An Oregon mom is being praised for the way she talks to her young daughter about makeup. Maggie Katz has swapped descriptors such as pretty and beautiful for one word: fancy.
In a TikTok video, Katz gets ready for work while her 3-year-old daughter, Delilah, plays with under-eye concealer.
“I do makeup with you!” Delilah exclaims.
“And why do we do makeup?” Katz, 33, asks. Delilah is busy blending, so Katz answers for her. “Cause it’s fun, and we get to look fancy. But are we pretty no matter what?”
“Yes,” the little girl replies. “Yes.”
“I’ve been trying to think of a way how to explain why I do certain things to my girls without making them believe they ‘need’ to do it. This is amazing,” one person wrote in the comments on Katz’s video.
Added another, “I needed this as a kid.”
Katz remembers that when she was growing up, she stared at women’s magazines that offered tips on how to look younger and more beautiful.
“Those messages stayed with me for a long time — you know, the idea that you need to change yourself to be successful or attractive,” Katz tells TODAY.com. “And I don’t want that for my daughter. She is perfect just the way she is.”
Parenting and youth development expert Dr. Deborah Gilboa applauds Katz’s powerful one-word swap.
“There’s been a lot of research showing that girls, especially adolescent girls, really connect comments about their beauty to their self-worth,” Gilboa tells TODAY.
According to Gilboa, the difference between fancy and pretty is that fancy denotes a choice. For example, Delilah made a choice “to put something because of how it felt or what she wanted from it,” Gilboa explains.
Katz says she often talks herself up when Delilah is watching her apply makeup.