Ill-Suited for Their Childhood
Our first clue came at the soccer tournament, as we lounged around the hotel pool.
All the girls in the over-12 division--those same kids who’d been barreling down the soccer field, sporting “Girls Kick Butt” T-shirts that morning--were now prancing poolside in swimsuits made of less fabric than a pair of shinguards.
I couldn’t help but stare at their tiny figures--hanging out of their tiny suits--and wonder what was going on . . . how could this be what the jocks were wearing? And what was going through their mothers’ minds?
My wake-up call came the next weekend, when I took my own 14-year-old daughter on our summer’s first swimsuit shopping spree.
We visited six stores in two days, and every suit she tried seemed like a carbon copy of the others.
The tops tended toward postage-stamp size, all strings and push-up pads and tiny patches of fabric. And the bottoms? Don’t even go there. . . . Gone were the boy-cut legs of last summer’s styles, replaced by triangles of fabric too small to cover even a baby’s behind.
I was embarrassed even to look at them, much less imagine them on my daughter.
*
It may start with an image in a fashion magazine, but that’s not where I’d cast all the blame.
Even girls who never see a fashion spread are limited to the choices that clothing stores offer, and those options all seemed to reflect a similar trend.
And it’s not just the swimsuits, says my friend Kristi, a middle-school teacher and mother of two teenage girls.
“It’s the spaghetti-strap tops with the bra straps showing, the T-shirts with V-necks cut down to the navel.
“It’s promoting a look that our girls aren’t physically or emotionally ready for. When you’ve got sixth-graders coming to school showing cleavage, something is wrong.”
She’s seen fashion choices drive wedges between mother and daughter in some families. Girls want to look like what they see, mothers want to preserve some notion of modesty.
For a mom, it can be exhausting, swimming against the fashion tide. You search store racks in vain for “appropriate” clothing, then give up--worn down by futility, too tired to fight with a daughter intent on looking like the other girls she sees.
“You begin to wonder if it’s a battle worth fighting,” says my friend. “You give in and feel like a failure as a mother, or hold firm and alienate your child.”
And you’re forced to consider a question I’ve yet to answer: What does a clothing choice really mean?
*
Ultimately my daughter and I compromise and choose three suits, enough to get her through the daily swim sessions at the camp where she’ll be working this summer.
One-piece suits, she makes clear, are off the menu. Maybe it’s peer pressure, or maybe the fact that I spotted a few models on the junior racks that Mommy could wear.
So we settle on the pastel Hawaiian print, with a clingy, T-shirt top that extends to her navel and a bottom so small I worry that her rear-end is going to get sunburned. A flowery-pink suit with boy-cut legs and tiny triangles of fabric where a top should be. And a blue flowered suit that I can only describe as a bikini.
I have to admit as she emerges from the fitting room that she looks so pretty it frightens me . . . like the soccer players around the pool, part Cosmo girl, part athlete.
*
Sandy Banks can be reached by e-mail at sandy.banks@latimes.com.
