"By adolescence, children are already primed to be preoccupied with how they look," the author writes. Yuliya Taba via Getty Images Over the past year, a friend’s daughter — let’s call her Lily — has repeatedly called herself ugly. When Lily is supposed to be brushing her teeth, she looks in the mirror with a frown on her face, eyes scanning her features with disappointment.
Lily has wavy dark-brown hair; she wants straight blond hair. One morning Lily put pink marker all over her mouth. The day before, a child at school had called her ugly, and she thought the “lipstick” would make her look prettier.
Advertisement Lily is 4. And she is beautiful. How has the world warped this child’s view of herself? Why does Lily even need to care about looking beautiful at 4? Is she worried about getting a date for the class field trip? More attention is finally being paid toward the harmful effects of social media on teens’ body image and mental health.
However, a recent study my lab conducted suggests that we are missing an important piece of the puzzle. Specifically, we discovered that among girls, a preoccupation with appearance starts as young as age 3. Advertisement In our study, we interviewed 170 children ages 3 to 5 to examine when kids start to value being beautiful.
Across all of the measures that we assessed, girls on average greatly valued their appearances. Girls said that to be a girl they needed to be pretty, and looking pretty was important. When asked to s.
