Parental Guidance: Speaking Frankly With Girls

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

You thought your nights of lying awake would start with your daughter's first date. But she's still just a kid, and already you're losing sleep over her appetite for diet tips and body-baring get-ups. Deborah Roffman, author of "Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent's Guide to Talking Sense About Sex" (Perseus Books, 2001), offers words of wisdom on some hot topics.

· What if your 10-year-old daughter wants to diet?

Roffman advises shifting the emphasis from an ideal of thinness to health consciousness. "The emphasis should be on eating healthy, feeling good about your body and being the best you can be, not on emulating some unrealistic standard," she says. "Girls are being trained to see beauty within a very narrow definition and to believe that's the one they have to fit themselves into." So go ahead and point out concerns you have about an excessive focus on thinness, she says.

This also is a great opportunity to explore your daughter's thinking, she adds. "I might ask, 'When you're with someone, what is it that you find attractive -- not just physically but in terms of their personality?' "

And she advises an even broader approach: "We have to make sure that girls are involved in many different activities that they feel good about, so they don't buy into the idea that their worth is dependent on how they look. We have to help them put appearance into perspective."

· What if your daughter wants to wear revealing clothes?

Your daughter yearns for those cami tops, but you refuse on the grounds that they look like underwear. Still, you're worried about making her feel left out.

Don't be swayed, Roffman says. "Anything that you think is not appropriate for your child, your responsibility is to say no."

But what about possibly sending a negative message about your daughter's budding body?

"It's appropriate for children to feel good about their bodies and to live in an environment where adults are fundamentally positive about sexuality. But it's misguided to think that means you have to allow your child to be sexual and adult-like in ways that are developmentally inappropriate. . . . It's not 'sex-negative' to say no to something that is sexually inappropriate for a child."

· What if your child asks about a word that shocks you?

First, advises Roffman, don't overreact. "This is not an emergency," she says. "Feel grateful that they're willing to talk to you about it. . . . When children think they have to worry about our reaction to the things they bring us, they stop bringing them to us."

Give a simple definition of the word, suggests Roffman. In addition, she notes, "If it's an insulting word, you can say, 'That's a word people use to put other people down. That's not a word I use, and I don't want you to use it.' "

· What if your young daughter strikes excessively provocative poses?

"There are girls who will put their bodies in a very adult-oriented posture and pronounce, 'I'm being sexy now,' as young as 5 and 6," Roffman says. "They're paying attention all the time, and what they're seeing [in the media] is woman after woman showing themselves as sexually available.

"You have to distinguish fantasy world from real life. You might say, 'That's the way a woman, especially a woman on television, might look or act, but you're 5, and she's a woman. Let's figure out how you can stand and walk that's about who you are, which is a child.'

"We need to make clear distinctions. [Children] see a world often with no boundaries between adults and kids, and adults have to make it clear that children are children and adults are adults."

-- Stacy Weiner