Moms' Ultimate Guide to the Tween Girl World (Momz Guides to the Tween-Girl World) by Nancy N. Rue

Author:Nancy N. Rue
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2010-07-26T21:00:00+00:00

6

“But You’re Beautiful on the Inside…”

Cultivate inner beauty, the gentle, gracious kind that God delights in.

1 Peter 3:4

“Sure, my mom’s told me to look my best and stay clean and presentable, but she is always saying that people will think you’re beautiful by the way you live, not by how much makeup you slather on.”

age 12

Ialways tell tween girls they’re my favorite brand of kid. Part of that is because they’re so naturally precious—no matter how they’re dressed or what state of neatness their ponytails are in. I’ve been to upper-middle-class suburbs where the ten-year-olds had highlighted hair and outfits more expensive than the one I was wearing. I’ve also been to rural boroughs with names like Possum Town where the girls had never seen the inside of a beauty shop, and hand-me-downs were worn as proudly as anything with a GapKids label. With their shining eyes and ready smiles and glowing skin, every one of them has been absolutely adorable.

Well, almost every one. There was the morning I walked into what was to be an all-day Girlz Only workshop where the room was set up so that one line of girls was seated directly facing the other line of girls. It took me about five seconds to see that there was no love lost between Group A—the chubbier, less coiffed, Kmart shoppers—and Group B—who seemed to have come directly from the Galleria, the nail salon, or the personal trainer. Group B was delivering disdainful, curled-lip looks to Group A, which was retaliating with bitter, slit-eyed glares that only barely covered their collective shame.

It was the ugliest group of young girls I’d ever seen. Bless their hearts.

I did bless their hearts, because neither group was picking up its respective attitude from, as my mother would have said, “anybody strange.” The moms who had gathered in the chairs in the back of the room had also separated themselves into two well-defined groups, and while their contempt for each other was a bit more subtle than what was going on between their daughters, nobody was doing anything to stop the obvious exchange of hatred. I found that even more unattractive.

My job that day was to teach the girls and their moms about inner beauty. I definitely had my work cut out for me. It looked like everybody in that room was going to need a total makeover.

I did not, however, announce that developing inner beauty was what we were going to talk about in our workshop. Here’s why:

For Group A, that would sound like a consolation prize. What they would hear through the filter already in place at age ten was, “You’re nothing to look at, but you can always develop a nice personality and people might still like you.” In their minds, being told they could have inner beauty would be like trying out for a role in a play and being given a job as an usher.

For Group B, it would be evidence that here was another adult who didn’t know what she was talking about.

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