A Princess Swallowed My Daughter

• Share
• Print this article

You have to fight fun with fun. You can’t convince your daughter she has more choices by constantly saying no to her. So you actually have to do the legwork to find fun alternatives.

— Peggy Orenstein, mother and author

Peggy Orenstein, mother and author of "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture," went on a personal crusade against the princess phenomenon that seems to have swallowed girlhood whole. The way Orenstein sees it, the princess phenomenon could very well be a primer for the sexualization of girls at way too young an age. Dressing up as Snow White or Sleeping Beauty is a perfectly normal rite of passage for young girls, she says, but society's fascination with pretty but helpless princess types has the potential to convince girls that physical perfection is desirable above all else and that waiting around for your prince to arrive is a realistic, viable option.

So what can you do to keep your clever little lass grounded, well rounded and focused on people, places and things (i.e. math, science and school) that don’t don bulbous ball gowns, enormous updos and shiny glass slippers?

“Not overindulging is step one,” says Orenstein, who’s not against princess dolls per se, but rather what they can easily represent – a girl’s fixation on outer beauty at the expense of her intellectual growth. “But saying no can be really hard. You have to fight fun with fun. You can’t convince your daughter she has more choices by constantly saying no to her. So you actually have to do the legwork to find fun alternatives.”

Some of Orenstein’s suggestions include buying princess costumes that are not licensed character dresses in order to give your daughter the opportunity to develop her own imagination (go for generic frills, just skip the Ariel get-up from "The Little Mermaid"), replacing Barbie with Wonder Woman and Super Girl figurines, and reading kid-appropriate versions of Greek myths that feature a lot of complex, strong-willed female protagonists. Oh, and the fewer commercials for princess-y toys a girl sees on TV, the better.

“We do lots of crafts,” Orenstein says of how she and her 7-year-old daughter steer clear of princess overload. “I taught her to finger-knit. We made our own soap. I think of them as women’s traditions that are cool to connect with.”

Which is not to say that a girl won’t fight to the finish to earn her royal role-play rights. Lisa Barr, a Chicago-area journalist (she’s penned features for "Vogue" and short fiction for Hadassah), is raising three daughters, ages 11, 12 and 14, and can remember the exact moment when her middle daughter, then 2, was sucked into the competitive world of fairy tale make-believe:

“A girl walked up to her in preschool and taunted her saying, ‘My skirt twirls and yours doesn’t.’ That was the exact moment the girl politicking began.”

And the girls don’t want to dress up as any old princess, Barr says. They each lay claim to a certain one.

“There are all these different archetypes of princesses,” explains Barr, who once threw a princess-themed birthday bash for her daughter despite the fact that she was rolling her eyes the entire time. “There’s Belle from 'Beauty and the Beast' and she’s interested in books and intellectual pursuits, and then there’s Sleeping Beauty who essentially lays dead until her prince comes along, and then there’s Cinderella, and we all know her whole story."

The problem, according to Barr, is that while these girls are all angling to become real-life Rapunzels, they're learning to identify her weakness and desperation as positive female attributes. Not to mention that princess play can also get super competitive and pit the girls against one another, undermining any attempts to foster supportive friendships.

"The girls will argue and fight tooth and nail over who gets to play who," Barr says. "It’s crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Jesse Knoble Gray, a New York-based mom, said that the year her daughter turned 3, she turned into a gung-ho princess product consumer. Like Orenstein, Gray did her best to keep things as “Disney-free” (or any other toy trademark) as possible.

“For almost two solid years, all she wanted to do when her friends came over was play princess,” she says of her daughter, now 5 and in kindergarten. “If we saw a book or a toy that featured a princess (any princess) when we were out shopping, Sadie would beg me to buy it. I never did, so I guess that was my way of thwarting the princess establishment.”

To Gray’s relief, her daughter’s interests seem to be broadening.

“I’m seeing more ballerinas, and more interest in playing ‘family’ (i.e. someone is the mother, the dog, etc.),” says Gray. “I suspect the shift is just part of (her) growing older and enjoying a larger perspective than when she was 3, but I’m delighted to see it.”

Elyssa Aronson Pellish, an emergency medicine physician at UMass Memorial Marlborough Hospital, admits that while she hasn’t succeeded in challenging her young daughter’s beliefs, she patiently – and sometimes impatiently – awaits the end of the princess phase.

“I have learned to pick my battles, and I can't fight with her every morning about what she will wear,” says Pellish. “She has to wear a skirt or dress every day, even when she plays soccer. She does still like to play with the boys and run around the playground -- she is just dressed to the nines to do that! I've tried telling her that she is beautiful no matter what she wears, but it is hard because whenever she wears fancy dresses to school, people always say how pretty the dress is, so there's always positive reinforcement. I'm just trying not to make a big deal of it, let her be who she is, and know that she will wear pants one day.”

Read Next:

• Share
• Print this article