Should Young Girls Be Allowed to Wear Bikinis?

Posted on July 8, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged #braindebate, bathing suits, bikinis, children and childhood, Daisy Alpert Florin, daughters, modesty, motherhood, mothering, parenting, sexualization, Sharon Holbrook, summer • Leave a comment

Yes!

By Daisy Alpert Florin

My nine-year-old daughter, Ellie, is going to sleep away camp this summer, and the packing list calls for four bathing suits, but “no two-pieces.” While I understand the likely reason for this rule—one-piece suits might be more appropriate for active play—it still irritates me because it seems to imply that there is something shameful about young girls wearing bikinis, so much so that they are forbidden.

In our house, bikinis and one-pieces are both suitable choices for swimming. I have purposely not drawn a line between the two because I don’t want Ellie to think there is a big deal about choosing to show more or less of her body. Granted, a string bikini might not be the best choice for swimming or cannonballing into the lake. But a well-fitting two-piece suit that gives her room to play and can easily be pulled down for bathroom breaks—well, I don’t see anything wrong with that.

When Ellie was little, I dressed her in one-piece bathing suits simply because they fit her better. If she wore a two-piece suit, I discarded the top and let her run around in just the bottoms. Putting a bikini top on a pudgy toddler chest seemed impractical to me, but I didn’t have a problem with parents who did. For the most part, I think mothers (and it is usually mothers) have fun dressing up their daughters in tiny versions of their own clothing, be it skinny jeans or bomber jackets or bikinis. I did this to Ellie myself when she was small, but by the time she was four she would have none of that, and I had to respect her decision to dress herself the way that made her most comfortable.

I prefer a bikini to a one-piece suit because I like the way it looks on me, plain and simple, so why should I ask my daughter to do anything different? I trust her internal monitor to signal when something feels right for her, and when it doesn’t. I want Ellie to carry herself without shame, and telling her not to wear a certain article of clothing might suggest that there is something wrong with showing a part of herself. I think there is a fine line between modesty and shame.

When they were first introduced in the 1940s, bikinis—which take their name from the Bikini Atoll, a site of U.S. nuclear testing—were considered dangerous, explosive even. Early in their history, they were banned in several countries and declared sinful by the Vatican. This idea of female sexuality as wild and destabilizing might seem silly to modern sensibilities, but forbidding our young daughters from wearing bikinis seems to be an extension of that kind of thinking.

There is something about girls and their burgeoning sexuality that we as a culture—and as parents—still find threatening. We worry about our girls growing up too fast because we feel there is something scary about female sexuality, and watching them step into that murky landscape terrifies us, when it ought to be something to celebrate. But our daughters don’t stay little girls forever of course, so what’s the tipping point when wearing a bikini is suddenly okay?

Nine years old was the last time for a long while that I saw only the good in my body—its strength, beauty and possibility. At nine, I hadn’t yet started to judge my body against some external ideal. Puberty hit me hard and by thirteen, far from wearing a skimpy bikini, I went to the beach wearing an oversized t-shirt covering my bathing suit. Even then I can remember wanting to go back to the version of myself that still felt beautiful and powerful. Now, at 42, I wear a bikini all summer and try to do it with confidence; I hope it sets a good example for my daughter.

Watching Ellie move through the world without self-consciousness about her body brings me a bittersweet joy. I want to bottle that feeling so she can always access it, opening it every now and then for a whiff. Because I know it doesn’t last. The world is hard for girls that way.

But maybe if Ellie wore a bikini now, those two pieces would imprint on her somehow. Maybe by owning her body in all its glory now would help her bank some self-love for later on, for 13 and 25 and 42—for whenever she needs it. Maybe wearing a bikini now would help her love her body that much more for that much longer.

Daisy Alpert Florin is a writer, editor and mother of three. A native New Yorker, she lives, works and lounges poolside in Connecticut.

No!

By Sharon Holbrook

It was a beautiful, warm June day on our backyard deck, where we were celebrating my daughter’s birthday. She pulled a little flowered tankini out of one of her grandma’s gift bags, and Nana hastily announced, “It’s open in the back, but it’s not sexy!” I sure hope not. It was my daughter’s second birthday.

My mother-in-law already knew my feelings on this subject, and kindly respected them. I don’t care for bikinis, or any other “sexy” clothing, on little girls.

I’m usually hands-off about clothes, almost to an extreme. My daughters dig through their drawers and match or mismatch as they like. I don’t care if they wear pants or dresses or—as on one recent school day—a bandanna around the 7-year-old’s hair, an ankle-length flowered skirt over patterned leggings, and a brown velour bolero jacket inherited from her cousin. “You look like a fortune teller,” her older brother commented, not unkindly.

When I do draw a line about clothing, I like to have a good reason. Icy winter day? Must be warm from head to toe. Special occasion? Be respectful, and wear something a notch or two above the everyday. Dirty or damaged clothes? Just, no. Underwear showing, very short skirt, super tight leggings on the butt? Cover it up, because those areas are private.

Not surprisingly, bikinis don’t pass my modesty rules. Sure, we’re all wearing small, tightish clothes at the beach, because that’s just a practical reality if you want to move in the water. I don’t think anyone in their right mind wants to return to those awful bathing dresses of a century ago.

But a bikini takes it to another level, and its small size has nothing to do with practicality. A bikini is meant to emphasize the breasts, hips, and bare skin of a woman in a sexy way. That’s the whole appeal of it, and it’s why men are such big fans of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, right?

That focus on and sexualization of the body isn’t appropriate for girls. One could argue that it’s innocently silly when a toddler’s little pot belly pops out of a teeny two-piece. Adults laugh and wink and say, “Isn’t that cute?” Amid the attention, the little one learns to vamp for others, to entertain them with her looks, her body, and the way she’s dressed.

Instead, the longer we can protect girls from focus on and display of their physical selves, the stronger and more mature they will be when they meet the full reality of a world obsessed with their bodies.

Their round babyish selves seem to turn lean and leggy overnight, then rounder again with the buds of breasts and the swell of hips and, before we know it, their bodies are womanly in every way. We owe them clothing and modesty rules that are consistent over the years and don’t fixate on or show off their bodies at any given moment—that let their bodies just be their own.

When she’s four, it means we can allow her a little girl body, instead of imitating sexy grown-up clothes and pointing exactly to where she’s going to have boobs someday. She can wear simple, practical clothes that allow her to run, jump, play, and swim with ease.

When she’s eight or nine, it means she can still be a little girl, even if she’s entering puberty early, an increasingly common reality. It means we don’t have to burden her with why she suddenly shouldn’t wear a bikini top that emphasizes her budding breasts, when it was okay before, a conversation that might make her feel her perfectly normal body changes are somehow shameful.

Even when she’s fourteen, though my daughter might argue otherwise, it means protecting her from her own sense that her body is all grown up, and therefore she is too. Just because her body has sexualized does not mean she has the maturity to take on all aspects of her brand-new sexuality. Sure, like all women, she’ll have to learn to sift through the admiration and catcalls and come-ons. But she needn’t come out of the gate into that reality wearing a bikini.

Through all those stages, her body is just as it should be, a beautiful thing, neither to be flaunted for attention nor covered up by shame. And when it comes time for bikinis, if she’s someday interested, it will be when she herself has the adult maturity and sense to know — and handle — what a bikini says: “Look at me!”

Sharon Holbrook is a freelance writer, who lives with her family in Cleveland, Ohio. Find more from her at sharonholbrook.com, and on Twitter @216Sharon.

Please join us TODAY, Thursday, 7/9, at 1:00 p.m. EST for our July Twitter party to discuss the issues. Remember to use the hashtag #braindebate

Photos: gettyimages

The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Book Review

Posted on May 28, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Book Reviews • Tagged book review, Daisy Alpert Florin, Louise Erdrich, motherhood, new mother, The Blue Jayâ€™s Dance • Leave a comment

By Daisy Alpert Florin

I met Louise Erdrich in 1992 when I was a sophomore at Dartmouth College and she was a visiting fellow. That semester, I was a French teaching assistant, running “drill” sessions five mornings a week. Erdrich signed up for my section, and so I found myself in the unusual position of being language teacher to an award-winning writer. Erdrich was friendly and self-deprecating—but she was my worst student, her accent thick, her conjugations clumsy.

Reading The Blue Jay‘s Dance, her luminous memoir of early motherhood, it is hard to imagine Erdrich tripped up by any language. Her prose is staggering, breathtaking in places. My copy of the book is covered with frantic underlining and enthusiastic asterisks marking places in which Erdrich captures both the frustrations and joys inherent in raising small children. “Growing, bearing, mothering or fathering, supporting, and at last letting go of an infant is a powerful and mundane creative act that rapturously sucks up whole chunks of life,” she writes. Nearly twenty years after its publication, The Blue Jay‘s Dance remains relevant; by keeping the outside world at bay, Erdrich is able to turn her focus inward, creating a story that is both her own and universal.

Divided into four seasons, Erdrich’s memoir describes a year in the life of a new mother, beginning with pregnancy and ending with a child’s first steps. The baby described is an amalgamation of Erdrich’s three daughters; her husband and three older children hover in the background. The Blue Jay‘s Dance is a record of Erdrich’s internal thoughts and struggles, as well as the story of the natural world as seen from the windows of her office. Erdrich is often alone, her main companions the birds, insects, rodents, deer and cats she watches pass by, as desperate for their companionship as a prisoner.

Halfway through the book, Erdrich follows a wild kitten who has disappeared beneath her house through a heating vent. Slithering along the floor of the dirt crawl space in pursuit, Erdrich worries that the house will collapse on top of her. “How many women are buried beneath their houses?” she asks after pulling the kitten toward her by its tail. “How many startling minds, how many writers?”

Running beneath the lyrical descriptions is this vein of frustration, with babies who won’t sleep, home ownership, Erdrich’s near constant longing for a cigarette. But instead of launching into a litany of complaints, Erdrich leans in to the loneliness and isolation to create art. “Life comes on you all unawares while you are stuck in an interim situation,” she writes about the unexpected joy she finds in waiting for someone who is late. “Sometimes I simply feel myself vitally alive in the moment, the interstice.”

It is in this pause that Erdrich writes The Blue Jay‘s Dance, taking advantage of the space that unravels while the baby sleeps or plays with a trail of toys spread across her office floor. “Sometimes I hold my child in one arm, nursing her, and write with the other hand.” What mother hasn’t felt this sense of division? Out of the wreckage comes this book, the words scribbled down while she waits for the peace needed to tend to her “real work.”

I didn’t read The Blue Jay‘s Dance until I was the mother of three children struggling to find my own voice as a writer. As I read, my mind wandered back to the early mornings Erdrich and I shared learning French. She had probably been up for hours writing or caring for her children while I rolled into class each day, my unwashed hair tucked beneath a woolen hat. Did her mind wander back to the children and work she’d left behind as I drilled her on the subjunctive? While she might have been able to imagine my life as an undergraduate at the college she’d attended, it was not possible for me, at twenty, to imagine hers.

At the end of the semester, Erdrich invited me, along with other students, to a reception at her house. As we ate canapés and drank sparkling water, I sat mesmerized by her as well as by the beautiful blond-haired children who darted around the house. I had no idea, yet, what roiled beneath the surface, no concept of the immense strength required to hold up that house.

Daisy Alpert Florin is a writer and mother of three. Her essays and stories have appeared in Brain, Child, Full Grown People, Kveller, Halfway Down the Stairs and Mamalode, among other publications. Visit her at www.daisyflorin.com.

The Search for God at Radio City

Posted on December 17, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged Christmas, Daisy Alpert Florin, Hanukkah, parenting, Radio City, religion, Santa, Santa Claus • Leave a comment

By Daisy Alpert Florin

I wanted them to have a sense of belonging that I had never had, to know who they were and to feel proud of being Jewish. But did that mean they couldn’t enjoy the Radio City Christmas Spectacular?

We were in New York to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular and my nine-year-old daughter was confused.

“Why are we going to a Christmas show when we’re not Christian?” Ellie asked me, twirling her penguin earring with two fingers.

I gripped her hand tightly as we made our way through the busy midtown streets. “It doesn’t matter if you celebrate Christmas or not,” I told her. “It’s just a fun thing to do.”

Before the show, we walked over to see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Sam, Ellie’s older brother, was blunt: “Why are we here? We’re Jewish.” Later, her 5-year-old brother Oliver declined an invitation to sit on Santa’s lap at a pre-show luncheon. “We celebrate Hanukkah, remember?” he said, loud enough for our whole table to hear.

The show itself was pure Christmas kitsch: high-kicking Rockettes, dancing Santas and speeches about believing in the magic of Christmas. It was the visual equivalent of eating a bag of gummy bears, and I loved it.

On the ride home, I asked Ellie what she thought of the show.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I just don’t like how people make such a big deal about Christmas. There’s no show like that about Hanukkah. I mean, the only show I’ve ever been to that had anything to do with Hanukkah was at camp. It’s not fair.”

“That’s because Christian people dominate,” Sam said from the back seat. “If they made a show like that about Hanukkah, it would be a waste of money because no one would go.”

Ellie looked out the window, a pensive frown on her face. I sensed she was grappling with issues of identity that had been brought up by the winter holidays because just the week before she had been upset after visiting the school book fair.

“Did you know there were twelve books about Christmas and only four about Hanukkah?” she told me when she came home. Her eyes were bright behind her blue glasses.

I told her that Hanukkah is probably the only Jewish holiday the book fair would have any books about and that was most likely because of its chronological connection to Christmas. (This kind of nod to religious equality always annoyed me. I felt the same way when the school orchestra felt the need to play a Hanukkah song at its winter concert, and it was always the Dreidel song. “Thousands of years of history reduced to the Dreidel song,” I would gripe.) Plus, I said, in light of how many Jewish kids went to her public school, I thought four books was a lot.

“It shouldn’t matter how many people there are,” she said. “There are more girls than boys in the world but that doesn’t mean girls are treated any better than boys.”

I could tell she considered this an injustice, and who was I to tell her it wasn’t? If this was her nine-year-old version of identity politics, more power to her.

But it got me thinking about what it meant to raise Jewish children, especially at Christmas. Ellie’s nascent sense of persecution was not something I could relate to because I had grown up celebrating Christmas. I was raised by a Jewish father and a Swedish mother but was not really part of either culture; we didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays or speak Swedish. Neither of my parents was religious, so our version of Christmas included a tree, gingerbread house and stockings, not Jesus or the Virgin Mary. (Easter was much the same: no resurrection, just jelly beans.) My husband, Ken, had grown up in an observant Jewish family and when we got married, I converted to Judaism and stopped formally celebrating Christmas.

Ken and I wanted our children to feel connected to religion in a way neither of us had growing up. We wanted being Jewish to mean something to them so, from an early age, we encouraged them to self-identify as Jews and sent them to Hebrew school, Jewish preschool and Jewish camps. I wanted them to have a sense of belonging that I had never had, to know who they were and to feel proud of being Jewish. But did that mean they couldn’t enjoy the Radio City Christmas Spectacular? That was something I hadn’t considered.

When the kids were younger, they had asked lots of questions about Christmas, wondering why Santa Claus didn’t come to their house and why we couldn’t have a Christmas tree. What made it more confusing was learning that I had celebrated Christmas as a child. “You mean, you get to choose?” Sam asked me once.

I didn’t always know the best way to answer these questions because, to be honest, I was also grappling with what it meant to give up the traditions of my childhood. I had no model for celebrating Hanukkah so for a few years, I kind of winged it. But with time, I thought we had created Hanukkah traditions that were meaningful and joyous, while keeping the holiday in perspective. I never tried to make Hanukkah the “Jewish Christmas” because such comparisons felt phony to me. I wanted just being Jewish to be enough for them, and for me.

Now that the kids are older, they have accepted that we don’t celebrate Christmas and have a better understanding of their identities as Jews. But it seems that with that process has come a kind of hardening toward Christmas. Instead of viewing it with wonder, they see it as something they have to resist. If Ellie sees Christmas as an aggressive force that could lay bare her identity as an outsider, I could understand how watching the Christmas Spectacular—and her Jewish mother smiling and clapping along—could be destabilizing.

That feeling I could relate to. As a child, I had often been confused by my dual identity. I wasn’t really Christian or Jewish but somewhere—or perhaps nowhere—in between. I had wanted something different for my children which was why I had chosen to give them a strong religious identity, at least to start out with. But while I was able to embrace the parts of Christmas that weren’t religious, like Santa and the Rockettes, Ellie found this difficult because she was still understanding what it meant to be part of a religious minority. Maybe one day she would be able to enjoy the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, but today was not that day.

Photo credit: nydailynews.com

Last Call

Posted on September 12, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Blog • Tagged babies, children and childhood, Daisy Alpert Florin, fourth child, motherhood, parenting, passage of time • 19 Comments

By Daisy Alpert Florin

What surprises me is that the very thing I craved for so long when the children were small and seemingly always underfoot—space and time away from them—is exactly what frightens me now.

When I was younger, I dreamed of having three children. Three kids felt chaotic, messy, and fun; three kids was the best kind of party. I feel incredibly lucky to actually have three children who kick my butt each and every day. My plate is full, blessedly so. So why can’t I stop thinking about having another baby?

I’m as surprised by this as anyone. The only time I ever thought about having a fourth child was soon after my youngest son, Oliver, was born five years ago. Late one night, I looked down at his soft pink cheek gently pulsing as he nursed and said to my husband, Ken, “Maybe we should do this again.” He turned over and muttered, “Maybe with your next husband.”

In the busy years that followed, that late night urge was packed up as definitively as the boxes of maternity clothes I sent to a friend right after Oliver’s birth with a note that read, Won’t be needing these anymore! But for some mysterious reason, I find it tickling my consciousness again now just when, by some miracle, we are almost on the other side. Oliver started kindergarten last week. Our house no longer looks like a nursery school classroom, and we’re finished with diapers, strollers and cribs. Yet the desire for another baby, long dormant, pulls at me. Please explain.

This is how Ken and I discuss whether or not to have a fourth child: he tells me it is a terrible idea, reminds me that we are old, have three other children to care for, and do I want him to have to keep working for the rest of his life? “You’re not exactly Mother Earth,” he adds as I grump my way through breakfast. I nod and agree with all of his reasons and we decide to move on. And yet, I can’t.

Despite circling around the topic again and again, we never really come to any resolution. And with both of us into our 40s, there is a very good chance that we may “run out the clock” on this particular decision. I don’t want to pressure Ken into making such a big decision, one that involves not only me and my wishes but every member of our family. But there’s something else that stops me from pushing the conversation further, something other than my reluctance to return to sleepless nights and the terrible twos. It’s because, deep down, I worry that my wanting to have another child is just a way to avoid facing the scary prospect of what comes next. For me, that is.

What happens to a mother when her babies grow up? I wonder as my daughter Ellie outgrows another pair of jeans and my older son Sam packs his bags for sleep away camp. What will I do with the freedom I’ve earned now that the rope that has tethered me to my children for so many years finds a little more slack? And since I’ve been a mostly stay-at-home mother for the past eleven years, I worry about job security. Is having another child merely a way for me to ensure against my inevitable slide into obsolescence?

What surprises me is that the very thing I craved for so long when the children were small and seemingly always underfoot—space and time away from them—is exactly what frightens me now. In the mornings, when my kids are at school, I vacillate between being thrilled at having the whole house to myself and terrified of being alone. During those quiet hours, fears float around me like ghosts. Is this what it will be like when everyone is gone? Have I given up too much for them? These disembodied thoughts pelt me from all sides, and a baby seems like the very thing I need to swat them away. And although I know another child would only offer a temporary reprieve, sometimes I can convince myself that’s all I need. Just a few more years and then I’ll figure out what I want to do with myself. I promise.

“You realize if you have another baby,” Ken tells me, “you’ll basically be 60 before everyone moves out.”

I have to admit this sounds both wonderful and nauseating.

Ken, who is my heart, has told me that he would try to have another baby if it was something I really couldn’t move past, but he asks me to look closely at my reasons for wanting one, to tease out the threads of maternal longing from fear of stepping into my future, some place only I can go. In the meantime, I ponder the decision to have another baby or to close that door forever, turning it over and over again in my head until it is smooth like a river stone.

My Mother’s Glasses

Posted on May 5, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged children and childhood, Daisy Alpert Florin, emotions, family, Mother's Day, mothers, What is Motherhood? • 3 Comments

By Daisy Alpert Florin

I look in the mirror and see my mother’s face staring back at me, the same sharp jawline, deep set eyes, high forehead, sloping nose. She’s been dead for fourteen years, so seeing her is both eerie and comforting, a kind of visitation. I never thought I looked much like her when I was growing up but now, at 41, as the softness drops away and age takes hold, what’s left behind is my mother’s face.

My new glasses, thick, brown tortoiseshell frames, add to the illusion. My mother always wore glasses. For a brief period in her forties, around the same time she got braces (don’t ask), she wore contact lenses, but the consensus was that she should go back to glasses. Glasses suited her; without them, she looked naked, her eyes slightly too large, her nose a touch too long. I rarely saw her without them. Severely nearsighted, she put them on as soon as she woke up and took them off only to go to bed. She even went swimming with them. I can still see her bespectacled face bobbing above the waves as she cut through the water with her dainty breaststroke, her curly red hair pinned on top of her head.

And she always had a stylish pair. My father would shudder at how much she would spend on a pair of glasses. “They’re the one thing you wear all the time,” she would tell me. “And right in the middle of your face!” She traveled to Europe several times a year for her work in the fashion business, and would often return home with a new pair, one that no one else stateside would have, which pleased her. The styles and shapes swung wildly, from chunky to wiry, square to round, retro to modern. As a child, it always took me a few days to get used to a new pair. When she died, suddenly, from cancer at the age of 56, a young resident returned her glasses to my brother and me in a plastic bag along with unfinished bottles of medications and the lip gloss she kept by her bedside. Seeing her glasses lying there, a brown oval-shaped pair so new I’d barely had time to get used to them, I burst into tears in the middle of the hospital lobby.

I was born when my mother was thirty and remember her best when she was in her forties, around the age I am now. I never saw her as anything less than magical, but perhaps she saw something different when she looked into her sleek compact mirror. Her red hair was going gray at the roots and fine lines were beginning to lay tracks across her face. Did she see a diminished version of herself? Did she wonder where the time had gone? “When people say you look tired, Daisy, what they really mean is you look old,” she told me once while powdering her nose.

I would stare at her as she got ready for work in the morning, watching her familiar routine: moisturizing, concealing, plucking. I soaked in every part of her, her long fingers and sharp collarbone, her straight teeth. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said one day when she caught me staring. “I used to look at my mother the same way, always thinking how old and ugly she was and I couldn’t imagine I would ever look like that.” I wasn’t thinking that at all, I wanted to say but didn’t.

As I move through life without her, I remember things I thought I had forgotten. How she curled her eyelashes so they wouldn’t hit the lenses of her glasses. The way she smoothed out her forehead with her fingers in an effort to iron out the vertical indentation between her brows. I see myself doing them too as my features shift and morph into a version of hers. I wear my new glasses on busy days as a way to camouflage the dark circles beneath my eyes. I realize now that she did the same, and imagine that was the reason people preferred her with her glasses. I understand many things now that I didn’t then.

When my children were born, children she never had a chance to meet, I searched their features for a sign of her. Did Sam have her nose? Oliver, her hair? And what about Ellie, her namesake, who, at 8, already sports her own pair of stylish purple frames? She’s in them all, for sure. But when I look in the mirror, I see that she lives on most strongly in me, not just in appearance, but in the steady way she moved through life and in the gentle way she guided her children, nurturing our independence and, yes, our style. I put on my glasses and see the world she missed.

Daisy Alpert Florin is a Staff Editor at Brain, Child.