Reply to Would you tell your child if they were ugly?

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "Would you tell your child if they were ugly?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No, I wouldn't tell them they are ugly. However, if they were unhappy with their looks and it was over something that is objectively a problem that can be fixed (e.g. a nose) I would support it.[/quote]

Agreed, if there were something that my kid couldn't get over, if it were ruining her personality, I might eventually support a minor fix. But the thing is, a lot of people will just fixate on something new. Plastic surgery is psychiatry with a scalpel. In too many cases, it treats a mental illness that can never be cured. So I'd have to be [i]real[/i] sure that any issue was truly about that one physical thing, and not something deeper. A hairy mole, a hooked nose, jug-handle ears... the things that cause children to point.

[b]But hell no, I would never tell a child they're ugly. I would not gaslight someone who hates that wart dragging down their eyelid; they are correct that removing it would be an improvement. Dismissing their feelings with a "you're beautiful just the way you are" remark would cause major cognitive dissonance and would make me untrustworthy[/b].[/quote]

I agree with the bolded but it also points to a problem I see:

Some people don't understand the difference between being honest and being rude or cruel.

As a parent, we are often asked to weight in on things about our kids that are not flattering or an asset. For instance, my kid is slow AF and terrible at soccer. So when she played soccer, she'd leave practice saying "Mom, I'm the slowest kid on the team and I'm not any good at this sport." I definitely never replied "No honey that's not true! You're really fast! You're great at soccer." Because that helps no one (except maybe saves me from having a hard conversation). But I also wasn't mean and didn't tell my kid she was terrible at soccer. Instead what I said was something like, "It is so hard to try something new and not be good at it. I get it -- when I was your age, I tried playing baseball and I was SO BAD. I couldn't throw, I couldn't field, I couldn't hit, I couldn't run. I was a 'zero tool player'! But I stuck it out even though I wasn't good, and I played for two years as the worst person on that team, and I got a little bit better and made a bunch of friends. And now, even the best kid on the team is still not a professional baseball player, but I play on the company softball team and even though I'm STILL not very good, I have fun doing it every year and I still use some of the skills I learned as a kid when I do."

You can be honest and still never call your kid ugly. It's called "parenting." What a concept![/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics