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eternally--mortal · 2 years

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So I just came across this video for the first time and I wanted to say something about it —as in, I feel compelled. It was captioned with the sentence “this is the perfect response to a 4-year-old who thinks she’s ugly.” The video I’ve linked of the scenario is a little longer and is outlined fully below. It is captioned “Little Girl Says She is Ugly And is Quickly Corrected.” I’ll let you draw your own conclusions when I’ve said my piece.

The woman in this video seems to be a very loving woman who has deep and loving concerns for the child involved. I’m going to let you know what I think about how she tried to help.

Let’s take it apart piece by piece:

Hairdresser (family friend): For real, like I’m not even playing with you. You won’t even like it.

Child: I’m so ugly.

—let’s take a moment and look at the situation. The little girl seems to be looking towards the camera, possibly at a reflection or image of herself. She seems upset. Children tend to use big language, even when describing small situations of inconvenience, because they have a limited vocabulary. It is completely possible that this child does not like how her hair looks, either because it’s not finished yet or because she has decided she does not want this particular look or because she did not know how to ask for the look she actually wanted and feels that her desires were misinterpreted. It’s also possible that she feels ugly for an unrelated reason.

H: *gasps, seemingly horrified and shocked*

C: What?

—the child is obviously surprised. She was not particularly upset when she described that she felt ugly. It seems she felt she was stating a fact that carried no devastating emotional value. She does not understand why the adult is distressed.

H: Don’t say that! Don’t say that —Don’t say that. You are so pretty.

—the child seems confused, not by the words, but by the response. The adult here is employing what I call “shut down language.” She is denying the little girl’s feelings because the girl used a statement (“I’m so ugly”) that made the adult uncomfortable. The adult’s knee-jerk reaction suggests that she is insecure about this phrase and about hearing it from a child. Rather than exploring what the child feels and why she called herself ugly, the adult has chosen to deny the child’s feelings. Denying a child’s feelings is a big no-no in conversation. It discourages a child from trusting you with their emotional honesty, and it discourages them from exploring their own feelings. You have made them feel as though they have done something wrong by expressing an emotion or stating a ‘fact’. In turn, the adult escalates the situation by making it about their own distress rather than listening to the child and getting to the heart of the problem.

H: You— When you look at yourself you’re supposed to say “I am so pretty.” You are so pretty.

—here the child begins to look ashamed. She was not expressing negative emotion before. Just confusion. Now she is being made to feel as though she has done something wrong. She looks away from the woman and at the floor. The woman in question is now giving her more orders. Now the girl is being told that she is not allowed to express negative emotions about herself or feel bad about her appearance. She is only allowed to call herself pretty, even when she does not feel pretty. The adult keeps using the word ‘pretty,’ but she is not describing what she means. Children appreciate specific information. Instead this woman is repeating the phrase as though it were a condemnation on the child. Her tone suggests that the child has done something wrong.

H: Do you hear me?

—the woman grabs the face of the child and forces her to look up. She has not allowed the child to speak. She continues to escalate the situation. Her actions suggest that this child is not allowed to express any type of autonomy in an emotional situation—emotional or physical. This woman seems to be acting out of kind-hearted desperation. She does not understand how to step back.

H: You got the prettiest little dimples. You are too cute. Aww…

C: *begins to cry*

—Now the child starts to cry. Do you see how the adult has escalated the situation? What could have been an easy moment of ‘You feel ugly? Tell me about that.’ And ‘your hair? I understand. It can be really hard to feel beautiful when your hair is only partially finished. Let me show you some pictures so you know what it’ll look like when we’re done. If you still don’t like it, then next time we can try something different’ suddenly turns into a complicated situation and a child in tears. A child who was not distressed before suddenly becomes deeply confused, unexpectedly ashamed, and emotionally distressed because the adult in the room didn’t bother asking her a few questions and letting her speak. Just look at how little the child has spoken in this interaction.

H: Aryionna, oh you gon’ make me cry.

C: *cries harder*

—now the child is being told that she is responsible for this woman’s emotional distress —that if she expresses ‘negative’ emotions openly, it is going to have a negative impact on the people around her —that she is responsible for keeping her composure, or else she is going to hurt people —that she is doing something wrong by expressing distress over a situation that this woman escalated

H: You’re not ugly. Baby girl. Oh my God, Aryionna. You’re not ugly. Baby girl.

—a repetition of emotional denial and escalation, stated in a voice that is distressed and accusatory

H: You are so pretty. You look like you have this beautiful chocolaty skin, like you are just so gorgeous. You’ve got these dimples. Remember what I told you? How many people got two dimples? Nobody.

—finally we are being specific. We are identifying specific traits that a child can observe and relate to in order to help her understand what is meant by ‘pretty.’ This is positive, because it grounds the child in the conversation. The issue is that we still don’t understand exactly why the child called herself ugly, therefore the added information may only cause more distress, because all of a sudden we’re bringing up new topics that the child might not have considered without allowing the child to address the old topic. Now we’re telling the child to split her attention between processing the old information and the new, as well as escalating her emotional distress without allowing her to speak. Specifics are very positive for a child, but only when she has the chance to process them properly.

H:You got two, let me see you smile! Let me see, let me see. You got two dimples! I don’t even have two dimples! Girl, let me see your teeth. Look at them pretty white teeth.

—now a child who has been carried into emotional distress is being told by the perpetrator that she needs to smile. Have you ever been told to smile by someone when you’re in emotional distress? Because I have. It doesn’t go over well. It sends the message ‘this person has no interest in my actual emotions. They don’t want to help me process anything. They don’t want to listen to me. They don’t want to deal with me. They want the instant gratification of seeing me smile because if they can control my outward appearance and make me look happy, they no longer feel obligated to worry whether I actually am happy.’ Never tell another person to smile when they are in emotional distress. You are making the situation about you rather than attending to their needs. Even children can understand this. Emotionally, they are hurt from being told to smile, even if they don’t know the words yet to describe exactly what they’re feeling and why. I can tell you, at this moment this child is likely feeling uglier and less loved than she was at the beginning of the conversation. The adult here is trying very hard to fix the situation, but she is making it more about her than she is about the child. She feels a need to control and fix rather than to trust and listen. Emotional conversations require mutual respect. That means trusting a child to emotionally sort through something without you giving them orders.

H: No, you’re not gon’ cry.

—now the child is being told that she is not allowed to cry. She has been led to believe that referring to herself as ugly is shameful wrongdoing that leads to tears. She has been told that she is not allowed to feel negatively about her appearance. She has been told that she is required to feel beautiful. She has been told that any other feeling is invalid. She has been told that she is responsible for managing her emotions so that other people do not feel distressed as well. She has been told she needs to smile. And now she is being told that she is not allowed to cry. She needs to bottle up her emotions in order to make the people around her feel good.

H: You are a beautiful little girl. And you are pretty. You are the prettiest girl in your class. *grabs the child’s face and turns her back so the two of them are face-to-face in close quarters, even though the child is showing signs of discomfort by turning away* Boom. Tell them straight up, when you go to school tomorrow, you’ve got your hair done, you’re gonna be like, oh look at my hair. Oh, look at my shoes. Look at my clothes. Baby girl, you are beautiful. Black is beautiful, and if nobody ever tell you, I will tell you, you are gorgeous. You are so pretty.

—so now this child is being told to compare herself to the other children in her class. What if she doesn’t feel as pretty as another girl? But she’s been told that being the prettiest is what matters. She is being told to brag about her appearance rather than investigating her internal, emotional life. She is being told that her happiness hinges on beauty and that her beauty hinges on comparison to others.

H: And you are gonna grow up, and you’re gonna be everything that you can be. You are gonna be the greatest nail tech, the greatest beautician, the greatest lawyer, the greatest doctor, the greatest teacher, whatever you wanna be. The greatest speaker, the greatest entrepreneur.

—if you tell a child they are going to be the best, but you do not give them the tools to emotionally develop, you are setting them up for failure, or at least for a very stressful and possibly lonely life. It is better to offer an open ear and a willingness to help than to put pressure on a child to be the best. This child has already been told that she’s expected to remain beautiful. Now she’s being told that she’s also expected to be successful. Not to mention, the adult in this conversation is piling on topics. This is a lot to process for a little girl without letting her actually talk through it all. And we still haven’t gotten to the heart of what actually made her feel ugly. What a horrible rollercoaster ride of emotions being thrown at a child that has been rendered too emotional to properly speak about them.

H: Whatev- What you want to be? What you wanna be when you get older?

C: *draws her hands up to her face* Uhh, the teacher.

H: You want to be, uh *pulls child’s hands down* Your teacher mean to you?

C: *nods*

H: *still holding onto child’s arms, gesturing with them* So guess what, when you become a teacher, you don’t be mean. *drops arms* *points at child’s chest* You be a nice teacher. You be- You going to be Miss- Miss Cotton. That’s what they going to call you. Miss Cotton.

—so finally the child is given a chance to speak, but the adult still fights to maintain control. She holds the little girl’s arms and moves them around. She tells the little girl what type of teacher she’s going to be. She doesn’t ask the child about it and let her speak.

H: You gotta be happy *touches child’s face where her dimples would be if she were smiling* all the time because you’re a little kid. You only four, and you should not know nothing about being ugly, because you are so beautiful.

—look, I understand what she’s saying here. She’s saying that it’s an injustice for a small child to have to endure pain and suffering. But that’s not how she’s saying it. She’s giving this information to this child as an order. All of a sudden, this little girl is being told that she’s only ever allowed to be happy. The gestures imply that happiness is signified by an outward smile rather than an internal feeling. This child is being told that she’s not allowed to know how it feels to be ugly. She’s being told that beautiful people are not allowed to express emotion because they are beautiful. She is being told that this is a good thing, and that she has no say. That is not comforting. That is extremely distressing to a small child. Children don’t process logic the same way that grown ups do. The most developed part of a child’s brain is the part that processes emotions. That’s how children make decisions. This woman is telling a small child that this child is not allowed to use the most developed part of her brain — the part that needs to grow and develop in a healthy way in order for this child to live a healthy life.

H: You hold your head up *holds the child’s cheeks between her open hands and points it upward and holds it there* You hold your head up. Okay?

—the adult is still taking full control. Her words are spoken in a demanding tone. She is not asking the child what she wants. She is not even allowing the child to hold up her own head.

H: Okay?

C: *nods*

H: can I have a hug?

C: *moves in for a hug, head angled down*

—this child is obviously still upset. More upset than she was at the beginning of this conversation

H: I love you. You are so pretty. . . . And you got a beautiful heart, and you just have some good manners.

—love is tied once again directly to beauty by verbal proximity. The beautiful heart is listed almost as an afterthought. It is being mentioned for the first time in the conversation.

H: Come on, let’s finish your hair girl.

C: No, I don’t wanna finish my hair.

—this child is expressing a concrete feeling for the first time since the beginning of the conversation. It is quite possible that her feeling of ugliness had something to do with her hair. She is trying to express a truth, which she hasn’t been allowed to properly do for this entire conversation.

H: Come on, we ain’t got no choice. We ready to get out of this chair. Come on.

—the child is told that she has no choice. That someone else is making a decision for her. That she is not allowed to express her frustration, even though the adult is allowed to escalate the situation and express her own feelings of distress.

H: Girl, you just almost made me cry, no lie. Uh-uhhh.

—the video ends with the adult holding the little girl responsible, once again, for her distress and her lack of emotional regulation.

This is not how you teach a child to love herself or to feel beautiful or to regulate emotions. This is how you teach a child to believe that adults don’t care, children aren’t allowed to express thoughts and feelings, and the voices and feelings of children don’t matter. This woman very obviously loves this child and wants to help, but even loving people can royally screw up a child by not listening and by escalating emotional distress. Nearly everything said here was emotionally damaging, not matter the motivation.

I encourage anyone who struggles in conversation — whether with children or with adults — to read How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. It’s not a perfect book, but it has a wealth of great principles for communicating with children that also extend to adult conversation. It’s a great help when you’re at a loss of what to say in potentially emotional conversations like these, but also in every day conversations. It does a great job of teaching how to help kids problem solve and personally develop and how to lessen the stress of engaging with another person. It helps us to translate our good motives into the proper methods so that we don’t hurt other people with shut down language and an instinctual need to maintain control or to seek instant gratification by forcing kids / other people to feel what we want them to feel.

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