By Jessica Jones
If it looks like the girls of today are growing up faster than girls a few generations ago, it could be because they are. Many girls are exposed every day to images of slim figured girls and women dressed in clothing that leaves little or nothing to the imagination. There are now crop tops made for preteens and mini skirt, fish net, high heel-wearing dolls are marketed to girls who are a long way away from puberty.
Whether or not the problem is lax parenting or media taking advantage of children is debatable, but what isn’t is the fact that girls are mimicking what they see and hear in the media, and the negative effects are far-reaching.
With the destructive effects of childhood in mind, Dannah Gresh’s Secret Keeper Girls Crazy Hair Tour – coming to Clearbranch United Methodist Church in Trussville on Jan. 25 – is spearheading the mission of promoting girls to wear age appropriate clothing and encouraging healthy self-image as well as build a bond between mothers and daughters.
“We like to say that a Secret Keeper Girl is a masterpiece created by God,” said Gresh, creator of the event, and author of the book of the same name. “Everybody is all about showing everything off, mentally, emotionally and physically and a [Secret Keeper Girl] is a young woman who is confident enough to say I know my value. I don’t need to prove it, and so she’s very culturally different.”
To demonstrate the importance of modesty the event features an exercise called ‘Truth or Bare,’ a fashion test for girls to determine if their clothes are a reasonable and modest fit.
As a mother of young girls, building a relationship with her own daughter helped her discover her calling for addressing the issues that girls face today. The importance of fostering good relationships between mothers and daughters is essential for young girls to have positive self-image.
“One of the factors in social research is parent-child connectedness,”Gresh said. “When mother and daughter are deeply connected, connected enough that they can talk about things, they’re not afraid to talk about issues of sexuality and beauty and insecurity and boys. There’s hardly a teenager out there that says ‘hey mom, wanna be friends?’ You have to develop that relationship when she’s younger. So you have to go in there when she’s in those teen years, get so deeply connected that that connection maintains itself to the more difficult teenage years.”
Gresh came to the conclusion that modesty was a topic that needed to be addressed among preteens and tweens when her research showed the risks for girls who wear clothes that aren’t appropriate.
“My research at the time was on sexual risk of teenagers and what increases the age when they have their first sexual debut,” Gresh said. Her research showed that girls who wear age inappropriate clothing and make up at an early age are more likely to engage in sexual activity sooner. This discovery led her to the idea of being able to spread what she had seen work in the lives of her and her daughter.
“So I realized dressing in an age appropriate way was really a safety mechanism for my daughter, and I wanted to apply that to her life and the doors just opened for me to share that vision with other moms as well,” she said.
This year’s theme for the tour is crazy hair. Girls are encouraged to come to the event wearing their craziest, most outrageous hairstyle that expresses who they are.
“With hair, makeup, clothing and branding, we all kind of want to be the same, and so being able to come to a place where you can say you know I’m confident in who I am and I’m going to be crazy tonight,” Gresh said. Gresh said the crazy hair theme for this tour is a teaching tool that allows girls to truly be themselves and shows them their worth through their individuality.
In one of her recent books, Gresh writes about how creativity and imagination are harmed by toys and video games. Gresh hopes to combat this and encourage creativity instead.
“Anything that allows creativity is good,” she said. “50 years ago kids weren’t confined by a certain kind of play because they had a toy that told them, ‘these are the rules and this is how it works.’ They would go outside and they would make something up.”
This, Gresh said, is essential to a young girl’s development of self-governance and decision making.
“Research has shown that that helps muscle up the prefrontal cortex of the brain which is where self-control and executive function are controlled,” Gresh said. So any time a girl is faced with an opportunity to create and problem solve or play make believe, you’re teaching her self-control. You’re teaching her the art of executive function.”
While the goal is to teach girls how to carry themselves, the teaching isn’t overwhelming or preachy; it’s engaging and interactive. Gresh describes the experience as “the most fun mom and dad are ever going to have together, and it’s definitely the most fun a mom and dad are ever going to have in church.”
“There are games mother-daughter show downs, giant beach balls confetti cannons, crazy hair dance offs where we take them not only through fashion, but the crazy hairstyles of the decade,” she said. “They’re going to have so much fun, but they’re also going to be confronted with some really good cultural questions about their value.”
Self-regard and self-esteem building exercises are the focal point of the event during which girls will ask themselves important questions.
“Is this going to make me beautiful or am I going to believe that the way God made me is beautiful,” Gresh said. “I don’t have to conform to the crowd. I can be just how I was created and that’s enough.”
Society has trained society to view a certain thing as beautiful, Gresh said, and her goal is to change that by teaching acceptance for all body types.
“The reason we think a certain type of girl is beautiful is because that’s how our culture has trained us,” she said. “The sad thing about that is you can go all through history and all through every culture and find that because they’ve been told that something is beautiful, they’ll do something stupid and drastic. We’re coming up against the American standard of beauty that tells you you have to weigh negative zero to be beautiful. That’s just not true.”
Mothers might debate whether to tell their girls they’re beautiful regardless of how they look or tell them beauty doesn’t matter at all, but for Gresh one extreme over the other isn’t her aim.
“I think either extreme is unhealthy,” she said. “I’m leery when our backlash from one unhealthy trend is to go entirely in the other direction. I think moms can be hyper focused on beauty and she can be constantly telling her daughter she’s beautiful and constantly getting her to exercise that beauty by taking care of her hair and clothes and all that stuff, but I think the other extreme to ignore beauty is as unhealthy. We are a culture that appreciates beauty and I think God created us to appreciate beauty and I think it’s perfectly okay to appreciate it. We just can’t be fixated on it.”
Fixated is exactly what some girls are, particularly those who strive to obtain a “thigh gap” – a gap between the upper thighs when standing with the feet and knees touching – or the latest unhealthy body trend, the “bikini bridge,” a space created between a bikini bottom and the wearer’s body caused by protruding hip bones.
These dangerous fads that girls desire to have go beyond being a mindless follower of a trend, Gresh said.
“They are a cry out for this generation that they need help,” she said. I think there are a few bodies here and there, especially young bodies who can make a natural bikini bridge, but all in all if your hips are sticking out that far, it’s probably because you’ve starved yourself.” The same is true for the thigh gap,” she said. Some, because of their bone structure, have a natural thigh gap, but for the rest she said, “Their thighs were made to be friends. They were made to meet.”
The message that body trends sends is destructive, she said.
“We’re saying that skinny – and not just skinny, but starved skinny – is beautiful, and that’s a message that we don’t want any daughter to embrace,” Gresh said.
What Gresh does want young girls to embrace is their individuality.
“You don’t have to be like anyone else,” she said. “Normal is overrated. Be crazy.”
Secret Keeper Girls Crazy Hair Tour will be at Clearbranch United Methodist Church in Trussville, on Jan. 25 from 6 p.m.-9:30 p.m. Tickets purchased on or before Jan. 24 are $15, $20 after. For tickets and more information please visit http://secretkeepergirl.com.
