You’re so vain; you probably think this blog is about you

There are gifts our girls might want some day which Country-Fried Daddy and I will not be willing to provide.  There will be no fancy sportscar in the driveway with a big ribbon on the roof for anybody’s 16th birthday.  Nobody in this family will celebrate her entrance to adolescence with a trip to the tattoo parlor.

While Belly and Miss D. might lament the lack of such presents someday, I hope their sense of self-confidence and self-worth will help them rise above their plight.  These gifts are the ones I’m thinking about now.  I’m not putting pennies away for a Wii or a motorized Barbie Jeep, but I am trying to make small deposits into the girls’ self-esteem accounts.

“Hey, Miss D.  That is a really great ‘D’.  You’re getting so good at writing that letter.”  Plink.

“Go, Belly.  You can do it!  You’re walking, baby girl!” Plink, plink.

I feel like Stuart Smalley sometimes.  “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggonit, people like you.”

Occasionally, I worry that these “deposits” are too modest.  Do they make a difference?  I doubted it this morning when Miss D. told me she couldn’t wear her Wally the Green Monster socks to school because baseball is just for boys.  (This is not her first “I-can’t-do-it-because-I’m-a-girl” statement, and it freaks me out to hear her talk like this.  I will likely spend the next week pointing out female police officers, soccer players, and doctors.)

I make an effort — particularly with Miss D., who is old enough to understand what I’m saying — to praise kindness and intelligence before adorableness.

She hears what she wants to, though.

“Don’t I look cute?” she’ll ask me after getting dressed for school.

“You sure do,” I’ll say.  “But you know, it’s more important to be kind than cute.”

Then Belly, who is learning almost a word a day lately, will say, “Blah, blah, blah.”

These two should take their act on the road.  They make quite a team.

They might make fun of me for it, but I want my daughters to feel so great about themselves that they do not hesitate to make a new friend at the playground, to try out for the school play, to apply to that college where the ivy grows on brick buildings and geniuses study calculus by the banks of the river.

I hope I’ll see the line between self-confidence and narcissism, though, before we all step over it.

“What will Elliott say when he sees my dress?” Miss D. often asked last year before heading out to school.

Poor Elliott.  He was almost two years older than little Miss D., and of course, he could not have cared less about her dress.  Now that Elliott has moved on to kindergarten, Miss D.’s questions about him have changed, but not drastically.

“What WOULD Elliott say if he saw my dress?” Oh, man.

I realize that all three-year-olds believe the world revolves around them, and I hope that Miss D.’s confidence, which already falters occasionally, is deep enough to last her through relationships with frenemies, acne, school-dance anxiety and all the other trials of growing up that are all the worse on the girl who doesn’t like herself enough.

When Miss D. says, “I can’t” or, “only boys can do that,” I worry about the balance in her self-esteem account.

When I see her mugging for the camera, though, I wonder whether we might have overdone it with the constant pep talks.

Because this girl:

knows she is pretty awesome.

Tagged as: kids and self esteem, mom blog, mommy blogger, yankee in the south