Self-Love: Is it Innate or Must it Be Taught?
It’s fascinating….
Needless to say I was ecstatic when I first laid eyes on my brand new bright eyed bundle of joy. In my mother’s words, she resembled a big Christmas doll. She was an almond brown color with big brown eyes and a head full of curly black hair. I was instantly in love and most everyone else who saw her fell in love as well. She was gorgeous. I thought that not just as her mother but as a person who could not negate her obvious beauty. I was slightly jealous of my own daughter’s perfectly almond brown skin tone. As a child I had been called pale because of my extremely bright skin and had even heard my mother joke about how she attempted to take me out into the sun as a baby so that I could get a tan.
I was also slightly jealous of her perfect curls while I struggled with my two different textures and tangles during my transition from permed hair to natural. To me she was perfect. I suppose that as her mother, I will always think so.
So imagine my surprise one day when she began questioning why she was brown.
Say what??
She then made the statement that she didn’t want to be her color, citing several others who were another color that she referred to as “peach”. She had decided that she wanted to be as well. She talked about the kids who were the color of “peach” in her classroom, or my bright skin which she also referred to as “peach”, and the color of her biracial cousins who are of black and Dominican descent.
Where did this question come from?
When had she made this observation?
I had assumed that the beauty and perfection that I saw in her as her mother was also something that she automatically saw in herself.
Had someone in her preschool said something hurtful to her about the color of her skin?
Why would she want to be any other color?
I was confused. She was too young to observe this sort of difference, right? I mean aren’t we told that kids at such young ages don’t see color unless they are taught to see a difference? With that said, this was a topic that had never been brought up in our household and not because it isn’t important because it definitely is! However, it was a topic that I assumed I would be discussing with her once she’d gotten a little bit older, not at the age of 5! Because of her young age, I didn’t feel as though the complications of such a topic would be appropriate or even understandable by a kindergartener. I naively assumed that she wouldn’t be faced with such a dilemma of self-acceptance at such a young age.
Even with all of the disturbing stories that we hear and see in the news concerning race, self-hate, and inequality, I still somehow thought that I wouldn’t have to have such a conversation concerning skin color this early on in her young life.
In my eyes she was still a baby but I had obviously underestimated the keen levels of her observations and intelligence about the realities of the world around her.
This was definitely NOT the mentality I wanted her to have!
I immediately felt incompetent not only as a parent, but as a mother, a black mother raising a child in a world of blatant and systemic inequality based on race and gender where one has to quickly learn to go blind to all of the negativity in order to love themselves.
As expected, I went full speed ahead telling her to love herself and reminding her of how beautiful she was and how skin color doesn’t matter and I found myself spouting a simpleminded and outdated, inefficient motivational speech fit for a utopian society in a world that doesn’t exist.
Still I made my speech.
Afterwards, I questioned over and over whether or not self-love was a thing to be taught or if it was innate. How does it work? Do we come into the world as blank slates that have to be built up or are we automatically born with a healthy self-esteem that is broken down by the troubled world we live in?
I was curious because in my panicked heart, making an observation is simply making an observation but coming to a conclusion that something must be wrong with you simply because your observation is that you’re different is another thing entirely.
She had come to me with the latter.
The harsh truth is that parenting doesn’t come with a handbook I don’t care who you are or where you come from, but that doesn’t eliminate us from the work of teaching our children to value and love themselves.
Although I have doted on my daughter since she was pulled from my womb and I have never gone a day without telling her that I love her, I know now that we help to build self-love and a healthy self-esteem in our children not just passively but also intentionally.
Eventually, when she goes out into this cold world, my teaching won’t necessarily suffice. She will have to know how beautiful she is on her own both inside and out. She’ll have to love herself, she’ll have to be proud of her almond brown skin. She’ll have to know that God makes no mistakes and that “peach” isn’t any more perfect than brown is.
I love her skin and I want her to love it too. I am teaching her to do that every day.
What I know is that regardless of whether or not self-love is taught or is innate, my teaching is still the filter through which she will view the world and herself and I now know that that teaching has to start early. I know that I cannot take anything for granted. I must continuously be on the job of teaching her to love herself as she is.
And who she is, is a complete and perfectly beautiful gift.
A. L. Hearn