Most young girls understand the cultural expectation to be pretty before they know how to read or write.
Most young girls understand the cultural expectation to be pretty before they know how to read or write.
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Researchers interviewed 170 children ages 3 to 5 to learn at what age children begin to care about their personal appearance.
The study found that preschool girls placed a high importance on appearance and beauty while boys the same age did not.
“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,” lead researcher May Ling Halim wrote in a column for HuffPost.
When presented with a selection of outfits and occupations, girls selected “fancy” outfits and appearance-related occupations (like being a model), were more likely to remember fashionable clothing and valued pop culture characters for their beauty.
This aligns with another study Halim cited, published by the International Society for Self and Identity, that found young girls gravitated towards toys that focused on appearance.
Girls were about five times more likely than boys to say they valued a pop culture character for their appearance than boys, often saying things such as, “I like all the princesses because they are pretty.”
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Instead, boys tended to choose their favorites for “action reasons,” such as liking Spider-Man “because he jumps high, climbs and shoots webs.”
The experts believe that “while girls around the world have long been taught that beauty is of the utmost importance,” the launch of the Disney Princess franchise and “girlie-girlie” culture in the early 2000s placed extra emphasis on the belief, which is only being exacerbated by social media.
And although the obsession with appearance has been found to begin earlier and be stronger in girls, previous research has shown that nearly half of elementary-aged boys are unhappy with their bodies.
“By adolescence, children are already primed to be preoccupied with how they look — a vulnerability that social media, often a very visual platform, taps into and exploits,” Halim said. “If a child is already steeped in these gender stereotypes and dysmorphic body ideals by age 5, just imagine what she’ll be thinking by 15.”
The expert recommends that adults be more mindful about the messages children receive on a daily basis through the images and toys that children enjoy and how they’re being spoken to.
“The preschool and kindergarten years are especially critical, as it’s during this time that children typically begin to strongly identify with a gender” and “form gender stereotypes based on the information that is available to them,” Halim said.
“Because children are learning that girls are defined by how they look and boys by what they do, we must change the information they receive.”
But unfortunately, it seems young girls are only becoming more obsessed with their appearance.
Elementary-aged girls are pressuring one other into trying and buying pricey skincare products as pint-sized beauty influencers — also known as “Sephora kids” — are ransacking beauty stores and sharing their 12-step skincare routines on TikTok.
Experts have been sounding the alarm about the ugly physical and mental damage these children could be causing themselves, but some parents are turning a blind mascaraed eye.
