The pressure for women to look a certain way is higher than ever, though if most of us had our wish, we would go back to a time before we knew so many ways that our bodies could be "imperfect." Childhood is supposed to be a time when you're free of these bodily expectations, but for one mom who wrote into the Mumsnet forum, her 6 year-old daughter is already insecure about her dark leg hair. Though her daughter is younger than when one typically expects a girl to start shaving, she asked other moms online if she was wrong for considering letting her daughter take the hair off.
User TellerTuesday4Eva explained that when her daughter started to complain of her hairy legs and lower back, she initially tried to discourage her.
"There's no way I would use hair removal cream on her skin & certainly wouldn't let her attempt anything herself but part of me thinks if she's adamant she wants it removing I should help her to do so," the mom wrote.
"Am I being unreasonable?" she asked in her post. "I do realize she's very young but just want to do my best to help her."
Though the mom expected there to be pushback, plenty of women had also been the hairy kid in school & understood why her daughter was self-conscious.
Many women felt that how this mom handled her daughter's body hair today could have a serious impact on how she feels about herself in the future.
One woman shared that she was so self-conscious about her body hair growing up that she would skip lunches so that she could afford to buy a razor.
And another person wrote in that even if TellerTuesday lets her daughter remove her body hair, it's not necessarily a permanent decision.
"The hair will grow back," she noted.
While this woman spoke from experience, attack the problem before the other kids notice.
But not everyone agreed that hair removal was the right thing to do. Some lamented the fact that the 6-year-old even felt bad in the first place.
One woman wrote in that it was important for TellerTuesday to assure her daughter that every body is different.
"We're the ones who give each other these body worries, we can also reduce them," she argued.
And another woman wrote that perhaps her daughter was too young to start the never-ending cycle of body hair removal.
"It makes me sad, all the same, that she feels like this and we would rather induct her into the hair removal ideal instead of building confidence in the body she has," she added.
While both sides make fair points about the pros and cons of hair removal, the main takeaway is that TellerTuesday needs to keep having conversations with her daughter about how her body is going to grow and change as she gets older. Even is she does decide to let her daughter take the hair off, framing this decision as a choice (not an imperative) and letting her know that she can always choose to grow the hair back is a way that she can be supportive and understanding of her daughter's feelings, while reminding her that woman are sometimes hairy and that's perfectly fine, too!
