5 Ways to Empower Your Daughters to Love Themselves

Halloween is a fun and creative holiday where children dress up as their favorite things. But there are a lot of potential negative stereotypes that can happen with costumes this time of year.

As adults, we are inundated with information about self-care and self-acceptance. Everywhere we look, we get mixed messages that suggest we need to love ourselves as we are and change everything that makes us unhappy. From our 20s, 30s, and into our 40s and 50s, we sometimes have a hard time with the idea that we can love ourselves for who we are. Knowing that, it’s easy to see how our own daughter’s self-acceptance can be steeped in a lot of misunderstood feelings and cultural misconceptions. When they’re faced with the same advertising and images we are, they don’t have the same life experience to filter it in a healthy way. It’s up to us as their parents to empower them to love themselves.

Here are 5 ways you can teach your girls to accept themselves starting this month.

Take Action
It’s one thing to talk about self-love but it’s another to put it into practice. Not only do you need to reinforce that your daughters should love themselves for who they are, but you should act on that for yourself. If you’re not able to take action to demonstrate your personal self-acceptance, your daughter can’t have a positive role model to emulate. Self-love comes in a number of forms including:
– Setting personal boundaries
– Being mindful about your feelings
– Differentiating want from need
– Practicing self-care
– Protecting yourself
– Forgiving yourself
– Living intentionally
When you can embrace these ideas, you can pass them on to the girls in your life who look up to you.

Acceptance
A big part of self-love is acceptance. You can accept who you are even while you seek to improve aspects of your life. And it’s just as critical to accept your daughters for who they are, what they love, and how they feel.
Your girls are getting a lot of different signals from our culture and the people around them. When they say something negative about themselves, ask them to tell you something positive. This will catch them off guard and force them to think in a new way. Tell them to the same with their friends and to avoid participating in damaging gossip. They can discuss the good things about other people instead. Positivity can be contagious.

Confidence
Confidence is equal parts self-esteem, acceptance, and happiness. Your daughter will be conditioned to focus on how she looks, but you can encourage her to focus on what she does instead. What does she
love doing? How does she feel when she’s doing it? That’s confidence.
She can have confidence in her body as well and that comes through learning about positive healthy behaviors. Instead of making looks a priority, she should consider how she feels when she engages in
exercise and makes healthy food choices.

Positive Affirmations
The playground rhyme “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” is aspirational. We all know that the things we hear from others color how we feel about ourselves. Sometimes we just need to replace those negative thoughts with positive ones. Teaching your daughters about positive affirmations can go a long way to encouraging an inner voice that’s beneficial to her. Any internal dialogue is an affirmation, both positive and negative. If she has go-to affirmations that are positive, she’ll interrupt any negative thoughts and will be more empowered to switch gears.

Embrace Empowerment this Halloween
The play that your daughter engages in as a child will help inform her personality and self-esteem, and that includes dressing up. If she is convinced that girls can only be princesses and never a knight, she may be missing out on other possible futures.

Halloween is a great time to encourage your daughters to play with other roles for women. For example, have your daughter pick an inspirational woman to dress as for Halloween. Maybe she can be an astronaut like Mae Jemison. Or she can pick a fictional character like Captain Marvel. Teach her about history by choosing Rosie the Riveter or Amelia Earhart. The options are limitless.
Who can your child be this Halloween to provide her with a sense of empowerment and self-love?