Teaching kids that there is more to life than being pretty

A friend’s posting on Facebook:

I’m a little concerned about my daughter’s ideas on beauty. A few weeks ago, she told me that I’m the only person she loves who isn’t pretty. When questioned further, she acknowledge there are some other people she loves who aren’t pretty. … Last night, she said she loved Daddy more than me because he is more pretty.

[My friend has many virtues, including having worked hard enough to earn a PhD in Computer Science and having been creative enough to write a thesis that was worth reading, but, as with most of the rest of us in the software world, she is not besieged by phone calls from modeling agencies.]

My response:

The ancient Greeks thought that beauty was as much a virtue as intelligence or anything else. So she is not totally off the human reservation in her thinking. Adults say that beauty is irrelevant but kids watch what we do, not what we say. So after hearing about how it doesn’t matter what you look like, the child then hears a pediatrician (female as it happened) compliment a little girl on “looking cute”. So plainly adults do think this is a virtue and an achievement. And presumably they also see adults paying more attention to attractive people. I’m not sure what the right answer is. Maybe to admit that being pretty is great but it is just one possible virtue. And that a more sophisticated approach is to look at the balance of virtues that each person has before deciding that A is more lovable than B based on any single virtue. In other words, don’t assert that “pretty” is less important in our current society than “hard-working” or “honest” or whatever. Children would be able to see for themselves that this is a lie. But point out that being pretty is not more important than a basket of other virtues.

A response from a mutual friend (also a mom with a PhD in CS):

Most young kids are instinctively attracted to people who are physically attractive (which is unfortunate, but it’s overwhelmingly true.) That doesn’t mean they’ll grow up to be shallow people. I think you can be “relieved” that she has already learned to notice and articulate the dimension of physical beauty, because that’s a prerequisite for learning to separate physical attractiveness from other features that make a person desirable.

If you look at children’s literature and movies, almost everything targeted at the youngest audience has an attractive protagonist and an ugly villain. With a slightly older audience, you start to see pretty villains, but it’s treated as a challenging topic, or it may be treated as a shocking plot twist. Then in adolescent literature, it’s cliche for beautiful people to be cruel.

Separately, what would happen if a group of software and hardware engineers founded a fitness company? Here are a couple of photos of bacon doughnuts from the Fitbit Boston open house: