Studies show that from the moment a child is born, people begin to praise them based on their gender. Young boys will be praised for being “strong” and young girls for having “soft features.”
The problem is that the more time we spend talking to a child about certain qualities, the more important they become. “When we comment on a girl’s cuteness more consistently than anything else about her, we suggest that her appearance means more than her other qualities,” Renee Engeln Ph.D. writes in Psychology Today.
Siera Bearchell, a former Miss Universe contestant, and mother of a baby daughter, Lily, has gone viral for sharing how people talk to her daughter based on whether she’s dressed in boy’s or girl’s clothes.
“Once I realized it, it blew my mind,” she starts her video. “I don’t care that people think she’s a boy sometimes. But what I care about is that I realized people talk to her differently when they think she’s a girl versus when they think she’s a boy.”
Bearchell says that from the moment they are born, women are judged based on their appearance, whereas men are judged on their actions and “what they do.”
In the end, Bearchell believes that we should be more conscious of how we talk to little girls “because they need to know they’re more than pretty.”
