I’m sure you’ve heard the expression that children are like sponges. However, you don’t realise how much they’re like sponges until you’re sitting with your mother and your toddler, and a strong curse word rips through the comfortable silence of the room.
You freeze and pray that your mother missed it, that her attention was elsewhere, that she didn’t just hear her baby granddaughter curse like a rowdy sailor. But the toy your toddler was struggling with still won’t cooperate, so another swear word settles loudly into the room and your mother gives you the look of death and you kick yourself for not watching your language as soon as baby was born.
Because that’s how soon babies start soaking up information and exhibiting that sponge-like behaviour.
Now that Baby A is 2 and constructing sentences, I have become very sensitive about what is said in front of her or about her.
I don’t mind calling her “crazy” or letting her know she’s “my little monkey” – I want her to be able to laugh at herself, not take herself too seriously, and know that these are terms of endearment from exasperated but loving parents.
There are far more harmful words to use on a little girl. There is calling her too thin. Or commenting on her chubby rolls. There is the way you speak of her skin colour. Or the way your compare her looks to her mother’s. There is how much store you place in her smarts, or how much you feed into stereotypes of what little girls like to play with.
As a mother of a little girl, I sometimes feel my sole purpose is to make sure my daughter grows up with enough self-esteem to sustain her when snide remarks hit, when teasing ensues, when cruelty finds a way to weasel into her life and shake the smile off her face. And no matter how much she may grow up to hear that she is smart, beautiful, kind and hard-working, it only takes one snide comment to destroy all our hard work and earnest intentions.
A friend recently told me how strangers pinch her baby’s cheeks and exclaim how “fat” or how “chubby” the baby is. “What a fat girl – what does your mummy feed you?”
It infuriated my friend and rightly so. I myself have dealt with comments from strangers that Baby A is “too thin – are you eating all her food?” And the look on my face as I was slapped with all my weight issues is not one I want my daughter to grow up seeing.
I remember when my little brother was 4 and returned from a summer holiday looking tanned, healthy and extremely happy. Sitting on the school bus, he was waiting for his best friend so he could tell her all about the water slide he had spent most of the week-long holiday playing on. As soon as his friend got on board, she exclaimed: “Oh my God, you’re black now! You’re so dark, yucky!”
My brother, who is now 19, gets ecstatic when any family member gets so tanned that they’re darker than him. He wears long-sleeve clothes to protect himself from the sun, always. He would probably buy whitening cream if his college allowance allowed it. His permanently tanned skin colour is the bane of his existence – and yet, to me, and to countless others, it is one of his handsomest features.
Words have an irrevocable power. It leaves me angry and helpless to know that I cannot control what a stranger says to my child or in my child’s presence. I can only pray that it won’t be something that will force me to put shards of her self-esteem, or mine, back together again.
Hala Khalaf is a freelance journalist based in Abu Dhabi
