How do you manage personal grooming/ hygiene and pre teens? e.g. eyebrows

[Aaaahhhndrea]

DD is like me- Mediterranean descent, very dark haired. She's 10.

I don't want to encourage her to think about eyebrows etc but I don't want to discourage her either. I have a tricky relationship with my own mum and I found the teen years really hard. I wouldn't have been allowed to get my eyebrows done.

Other things as well like good skincare. How do you bring it up gently?

Oh a mother who loves her child so much she wishes to destroy said child’s self esteem. Fabulous and shallow

Yes she definitely sounds like a mother who wants to make her child miserable, and not a mother who wants to avoid repeating the mistakes that caused her unhappiness as a child 🙄 What a twatty and judgemental comment. Maybe you feel better about yourself now.

I have wondered similar, OP. I don't want to bring it up because I think my DD is perfect and just as nature intended and I don't want her to be a slave to unattainable beauty ideals. On the other hand, I remember what it's like to be that age and I vividly remember attacking my eyebrows with the tweezers and almost wrecking them. Luckily mine withstood it and grew back, but my best friend has almost no eyebrow hair now because she repeatedly pulled it all out. I would like DD to feel able to just ask me to take her for a brow wax IF she feels she wants them done, rather than butcher them herself. But I won't be the one to put the idea in her head.

My plan is to basically carry on as I am. She comes to the salon with me to get mine threaded or waxed (because I always combine it with a trip to town for shopping and errands). She also frequently sees me go without any kind of eyebrow grooming for months on end when I can't be bothered. So she will hopefully see that natural brows are fine, and also that it's not embarrassing to groom them. It's just purely a matter of personal preference and neither is more/less acceptable than the other.

Skincare I think is slightly different and I don't agree that anything more than soap and water is "grooming" rather than hygiene. It depends on skin type. My skin is very unhealthy if I wash it with soap. Dry, uncomfortable and tight. When I take care of my skin with a proper regime it is cleaner, less congested, feels more comfortable and my SPF soaks in better. I will definitely be making sure that DD has a proper skincare regime that suits her skin type.

Nomorepolitics that what my dad said to me too about my hairy legs 😊

I wish my mum had taken me to have my eyebrows dealt with properly and waxed my top lip for me instead of me trying to deal with it secretly and with embarrassment, and over plucking. I'm dark haired and I hated it.

Oh don't be daft, no properly supervised 10 year old is going to be attacking their eyebrows with tweezers! What made me pluck my eyebrows wasn't peer pressure - my peers couldn't have cared less about eyebrows - and i got bullied a lot about other things- it was my mother going on an on about how she'd had eyebrows "just like mine" and she'd hated them and tweezed them to smithereens. She intended it as a cautionary tale, i think, but all it did was plant the idea that thick eyebrows were undersirable. Wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise.