When we found out we were pregnant with a girl, we got loads of hand-me-down clothes. There was the occasional “little princess” onesie, and we swiftly put it into the donation pile. Others might enjoy the whole princess idea, but my husband and I were not in favor of them.
So what happened? Of course by the time our daughter was three years old, she started asking for princesses and princess dress up. This was quickly followed by her insistence that she would grow up to be a cheerleader-princess-ninja, then finally that she would grow up to be a princess.
We’ve always let our kids make their own decisions on what they would wear and what their interests were. Our son wore a Wonder Woman headband and bracelets every day for a whole summer. However, it was hard for us to go along with our daughter’s love of princesses.
I grew up with the princesses who seemed fairly helpless and always needed the brave prince to come to their rescue. However, what really bothered me about princesses is that they often times end up falling in love and living “happily ever after.” While this is a nice idea, I fear that it will lead to the idea that love, marriage, and relationships are easy and perfect if you find your “prince charming.” The fact is, relationships are work, and both partners need to put the work in to make the relationship work.
I have liked some of the more recent princess movies better where there is more independence in the princesses and less of a focus on finding a guy who will save them. Many of them don’t really even have a major love interest, which makes a lot of sense, because that isn’t the major focus of this age group. This helps me feel a little better about her idealizing some of the princesses, and this has lead to our current view of princesses in our house.
Instead of avoiding princesses, we emphasize the aspects of princesses that we like.
Nervous and scared to go down the water slide by yourself…. Let’s be brave like Moana!
Fighting with your sibling… take are of and love your sibling like Elsa and Anna.
Learning to get along with your peers… princesses have to be good leaders of their people.
The more we thought about it, the more we saw that princesses have some good qualities that all kids should aspire to develop… leadership, strength, empathy for others, bravery. These are great qualities for kids to think about and work on, so if being a princess is what gets us there, that will work for us. We certainly aren’t in love with princesses, but we are going to emphasize the qualities that we’d like to see both of our kids develop.
