Parenting Through the Cinderella Complex

Posted by: Lauren Young on June 27

This is written by Savita Iyer-Ahrestani, a freelance financial journalist now living in The Netherlands who guest blogs for Working Parents every other Friday.

My four-and-a-half-year-old daughter came home from school with a question for me: Could she become blonde?

Almost 40 years ago, I had asked my mother the same question – and more than once. As one of a tiny sprinkling of children with black hair and dark skin, I’d have given a lot more than my right arm to be white and blonde. Despite that, and barring the fact that my daughter is only four-and-a-half years old, her question still took me by total surprise. This, after all, is 2008: The world is mixed and everyone celebrates diversity. Why, then, did my little girl want to be blonde?

“Because the blonde girls in my class are so beautiful,” she said. “Blonde hair really is the nicest, so can my hair please become blonde?”

I am sure my daughter will outgrow drawing herself with blonde hair because she is only four-and-a-half. All the same, judging by my own past and the many years I spent grappling with identity, belonging and sense of self, I still decided to turn to an expert for some help in parenting through this Cinderella Complex: Maureen Reddy, professor at Rhode Island College and author of, among others, “Crossing the Color Line: Race, Parenting and Culture,” and “Everyday Acts Against Racism.”

I asked Maureen how I, as a parent, could assuage any feelings of inadequacy my daughter – even at this young age – might have and foster in her a sense of security about who she is and how she looks.

“Wow, this is the million dollar question, isn’t it?” Maureen wrote back to my e-mail.

Obviously, the majority of us go through decades of insecurity before we come to terms with who we are and how we look. Yet Maureen said she was surprised to learn that in this era, a little girl with dark hair wanted to be blonde.

“I think it’s all about location,” she wrote. “Were a child to feel that in 2008 in Providence, RI, where I live (where the school aged population is something like 75% “minority”), I’d be far more surprised than a child from a less diverse area. I’ve been doing a lot of work in Ireland, for example, and I’d not be very surprised if a child in Dublin said that.”

It is true that we live in a part of Europe where blonde is a dominant hair color. Except for my daughter, every girl in her ballet class is blonde. But is that the only reason why my daughter thinks that Cinderella, with her blonde hair, is far more beautiful than black-haired Princess Jasmine? Despite the celebration that’s made of women of color, how diverse a world are we really living in and why do so many children of color want to be white?

Kati Teague, an illustrator in London, who has worked on over 60 multicultural/educational books for children believes that even in 2008, diversity is more in name than in actuality. For girls, things are even more complex, she says, because what’s portrayed in contemporary literature and media as aspirational beauty is predominantly “white and skinny.”

“The overwhelming majority of books aimed at children portray white children, so there is little on offer for children of color to identify with,” Kati says. “I have been told by mainstream publishers that black kids on book covers do not sell as well as white kids, so they may have a few token ethnic minorities inside the book but not on the cover. You will find that books with kids of color on the covers are from small independent publishers who try very hard to address the imbalance. Sadly, many of these companies do not survive or are swallowed up by the mainstream publishers, who do not continue to actively promote ethnic minority characters other than as token characters.”

Rather than stand out from the crowd, then, kids of color in a community where the majority of their peers are of one ethnicity would wish to be the same, Kati says.

“Interestingly, though, this does not always mean black kids want to be white. In a community where the majority of kids are black, white kids often take on the characteristics of their black peers — language (verbal and body language), style and culture.”

In the era before it was “cool” to be black, before Bollywood became mainstream and before there were even “token characters” I could potentially identify with, I thought life would be a lot easier if I were white and blonde. And even today, experts like Maureen believe that it probably would be easier for darker skinned girls to be lighter skinned here in the west “because white supremacism is still very much with us, regardless of attempts to foster diversity.”

It’s not just in the West, though: In India, where I’m originally from, white skin is also highly prized, and there is constant innovation in whitening creams and treatments to lighten skin. While there are a number of darker-skinned models, most young women look up to Bollywood actresses like Aishwaraya Rai Bachchan , and they are extremely fair. A former Miss World, Rai Bachchan is an internationally renowned beauty and a spokesmodel for L’Oreal. But the make-up colors she advertises wouldn’t suit most Indian women because we’re more Halle Berry’s color, if not even darker.

When I look at my daughter, I’m haunted by my second-grade nightmare, where two boys kept refusing to sit next to me because they said I was “dipped in poo.” It took many years after that for boys to be interested in me, but I have to say that as a grown-up, I have never experienced any discrimination on either a personal or professional level on account of my hair or skin color.

I know as an adult that everything eventually comes together, but while I never bought my mother’s consolation stories of white women sitting in the sun for hours to get my color, I do want to shield/help my child, so I’ll follow some of Maureen Reddy’s tips, such as showing my daughter pictures of diverse groups of Americans; talking positively about diversity; repeatedly praising her attributes; even trying via the computer to stick blonde hair on a picture of her, to see if she thinks she really looks better. I will also tell her that my blonde friend Carol Clouse, a writer in New York, thinks that Princess Jasmine has it way over Cinderella, and that she has always wanted to “smoky and mocha-skinned, with thick black curls down to my waist.”

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