13 yo DD and make-up

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13 yo DD is going through stuff, has been for a while, whether it's the usual teenage angst or there's more to it, it's really hard to tell at this point. She has help but keeps my DH and I at arms length.

Yesterday we had a bit of a situation at home that would traditionally have elicited some sort of consequence. DD had plans to meet with her friends in town and DH but DH and I decided that we wouldn't stop her from doing that because meeting with people would do her good, and we would think of a different consequence.

However DD said she no longer wanted to go, and we found ourselves encouraging her to go out and being supper nice, almost apologetic, even though on the face of it she should have had a blocking and a consequence.

We persuaded her to meet with her friends in the end, and just as she was about to leave I noticed she'd put on dark eyeliner Egyptian style, so it looked more like dress-up than make-up.

I was taken aback, didn't want to start another situation, I said something like 'oh that's different. You look so beautiful'. And she said something like 'yes, I am beautiful', in a sort of 'don't get into it' way. For what it's worth, she does not think she's beautiful, she has zero self esteem and is not girly in the very slightest, quite the opposite.

So off she went looking like that.

In some ways it is text book teenage behaviour, trying things out, etc. On the other, she is 13 and this was not putting make up on in the traditional sense, it was more of a statement. It's not that she wouldn't know how to put eyeliner on properly and needs a make-up lesson, she meant to do that.

Would you raise it? Would you let her go out like that again? Would you just ignore as 'a face'?

[BloggersNetwork]

Sorry for typos, blocking = bollocking