Dear Prudence: My daughter is embarrassed by me

[cereta]

Q. Success through spandex?: I am a successful, work-from-home businesswoman who is an embarrassment to my tween daughter because I don’t look like the other moms at school. Specifically, I don’t wear Lululemon pants. She has asked me not to pick her up from school. How do I get my daughter to understand that her mom is a strong, respected, powerful woman whom she should be proud of? How do I get through to her that success isn’t defined by wearing the right brands but by having the respect of peers? Or should I just go buy myself a pair of Lululemons so she can have the respect of her peers?

A: This can’t be real. Can this be real? This can’t be real. And yet—anything that can happen … will happen. I have two suggestions: 1. Go full Auntie Mame and start picking up your daughter in ball gowns and ripped flannel and increasingly embarrassing costumes; teenagers can be painfully conservative, and this tendency ought to be gently teased right out of them. 2. Let her take the bus home. If she doesn’t like what the bus driver is wearing, she can try offering constructive criticism and see how other people welcome her input on their ensembles.

Comments

[cereta]

Dear LW: Welcome to your daughter's adolescence. You are pretty much going to be persona no grata for a few years, so you might as well just strap in and ride it out. The kids of those other moms? Are probably just as embarrassed by their moms. It's a phase.

Also, that "respect of her peers" thing? This is a really bad time in a girl's life to teach her to hang her self-worth on what her peers think of her. I'm not sure there's a good time to teach that, but the tween years are really, really not.

Dear Prudie,
Really? You're skeptical of this? I mean, forget whether you experienced it. Do you not read/watch tv/watch movies?

[recessional]

*facehands* LW: She's trying to get the respect of her peers. Sadly her peers are other tween girls who have in fact literally entered one of the most shallow periods of their lives.

There is all kinds of stuff you can do to address these kinds of things! Sadly they are slow, long-term, complicated and exact techniques will need to be adapted depending on your precise child. And also just how bad her peers are and what other dynamics (such as class, oh GOD such as class, no seriously) are at play.

But what has actually happened to your daughter is that her brain has just woken up and realized that the respect and regard of her peers is NOW MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIFE ITSELF* without giving her any space to actually internalize this, and necessarily without any experience to modulate it.

Fuck the respect of her peers, ok. The LAST THING you want her to worry about is the respect of her peers.


(I actually do have thoughts, many of them, on where to go with tween-girls from this kind of place but they're really, really tailored to the exact kid because that makes such a huge difference, just . . . no do not go buy lululemons, and do not go on about the respect of peers.)


*no seriously: I used to walk fifteen minutes home up hill into the wind in -20C/0F and lower temperatures in jeans and sneakers and no mitts and no hat, just a ski jacket - that had to be a PARTICULAR BRAND of ski-jacket which was actually designed to be a ski-snowboard jacket by a company that worked out of Whistler and was not actually quite warm enough - because to do otherwise was social death and I PREFERRED TO RISK FROSTBITE, despite being fully educated on it, than that. This was totally normal behaviour and if anything I was an outlier TOWARDS being stubborn about comfort over acceptance. I swear you could hear SO MANY PARENTS sighing with relief when snowboarder-chic started including knitted hats and floppy mitts.

I was also subsequently employed by my mother and my aunts/adopted-aunts to find fashion-acceptable cold-weather stuff that was actually adequate for the cold weather, which sometimes meant "okay yeah just . . . this is the expensive bday present okay" and sometimes meant "I promise that this technique of layering three different jackets is as warm as her ski-jacket and yes I KNOW it would be more sensible to wear the skijacket but shut up and let her wear the layers already."

[watersword]

....okay I can see where the mother is coming from with "the respect of her peers" things, she's thinking like a grownup for whom the respect of her peers means that she does good work at her place of employment and has warm relationships with her social circle. Unfortunately, her daughter has not yet entered the phase of her life where those markers of respect are relevant, she is enduring the period when in-group markers assume a much greater importance than they ever will again.

There are very few occasions on which it is even contextually appropriate to base one's judgment of a person on their clothes. Being costumed well for the character an actor is portraying; a formal event about fashion such as last night's Met Gala; military personnel adhering to uniform code; wearing a racist or misogynistic or otherwise inappropriate Halloween costume; these would be examples. And the teenage years, when people are frantically trying to find Their People and sartorial markers are the first thing they know to look for.

There's basically nothing to do with this period except wait it out, LW. Keep modeling what an adult woman cares about (accomplishments, empathy, critical thinking, whatever values you want your daughter to learn from you), and let the teenage nonsense wash over you. (I mean, listen to your daughter's concerns, because you care about her, and this is important to her, and it's not unknown for one's children to know more about a subject than oneself, like how my sister and I have been teaching our mother about systemic racism for a while now, but mostly just let it wash over you.)

[likeaduck]

Is it super naive of me to think maybe it's not inevitable that tweens become mindless trend-automata and totally lose all sense of self and relation to folks they love just because they're tweens? Like, that feels really stereotypical and like giving up on the amazing capacity kids have? And like giving up on trying to communicate? It makes me a bit sad. Like, maybe I just have no concept, because the youth I work with are 13+ and the kids in my personal life are under 7, but...seriously?