There is nothing more disheartening to hear than the shrill cries of a little child. And there is nothing more enraging than when you realise that those desperate screams of pain are needless, heedless even.
I am not speaking here about the most extreme forms of abuse of children, though these sadly remain a rampant atrocity that causes misery for so many; an atrocity that always requires our urgent action.
But make no doubt this article is about abuse.
It is about a form of abuse parents (particularly mothers) inflict upon their children (particularly daughters) in what I deem to be one of the earliest and most brutal forms of socialisation to the conformity of society’s rigid standard of beauty.
I will never forget the one afternoon when I was moving through a clothes boutique and heard the most piercing shriek ever. So sharp was it that I put down the garment I was looking at to track the source of that cry.
And there it was a few paces ahead — a little girl, who couldn’t have been more than a year old, inconsolable from having her ears pierced with a pair of gold studs fed into a piercing gun.
Paying no heed to her cries or the tears washing over her scrunched-up face, her mother turned her daughter’s head, offering her other ear to the woman wielding the gun. Soon, another stapler-like snap flashed through the little girl’s earlobe, almost in unison with another scream stabbing the silence.
It was the kind of sound that makes one nauseous.
As the girl’s mother paid the fee for the ordeal and rubbed a cotton swab moist with spirits over her daughter’s ears, I felt obliged to stop her and ask the simple question.
“Why are you putting your child through so much pain?”
Her answer was equally simple.
“Because it’s better to get it over and done with now,” she said in an unaffected tone. “When she’s older she won’t even remember this, but she’ll be wearing earrings and Âlooking pretty.”
At this statement, a self-indulgent smile spread over the woman’s face, a smile directed not only at me, but also at the weeping child in her arms. At that point, I noticed the pair of golden chandeliers, crusted with multicoloured gems, that dangled from her own ears.
“She’ll be wearing earrings like these and looking pretty like me,” is what I think she meant.
Call it what you like, but I maintain that this sort of practice is pure abuse.
The agony is unnecessary and the child has no say in the issue. The pain from something like a measles shot is altogether a different story for it is necessitated by the pursuit of health and wellbeing for the child.
But I just feel that body piercings at so young an age, and only for cosmetic purposes, represent one of the many ways that mothers decide — on behalf of their children — what they should believe beauty means, and what standards of it they should aspire to. Already mothers begin to limit space for their daughter’s self-exploration of the concept.
And this manifests in so many Âdifferent guises.
I’ve seen it when I’ve come across girls no older than 10 traipsing through malls adorned in mascara, eyeliner and lipstick — not in that “playing house” kind of way, but with that edgy precociousness that tells you they don’t want to be thought of as kids.
I’ve also seen it when I am sitting at the hair salon having my hair done and seated next to me is a little girl, who can’t even be five years old, having a weave stitched on to her head, or some putrid-smelling chemicals mulched into her scalp. She cries because she says she feels like her head is on fire.
Her mother tells her to behave and that she’ll buy her sweets afterwards if she keeps quiet.
Already, the message is being instilled into her. No pain, no gain.
I know that sometimes children beg for these things, but they don’t really know what they are asking for.
If your toddler asked to touch a red-hot plate on a stove, what would your response be?
Perhaps I am just “old school”.
But I feel that mothers don’t do their daughters much of a service by acceding to their every childhood whim. It’s the same thing with a parent who plies her child with buckets of fried chicken and other cholesterol-inducing eats she chooses to call “treats”.
If that child should become obese, he or she is put on the back foot among their peers — not only in general health and wellbeing, but also in self-confidence.
The wrong on the other end of the spectrum is when parents impress upon their children that wearing the latest styles of everything is a must if people are to take notice of them; that their own coils and curlicues of coarse hair are just not good enough and need straightening and sleeking before they can be beautiful.
Isn’t that what that box of chemical relaxers promises little black girls anyway? Beautiful beginnings?
Yes, parents will say they don’t have control over their children these days, that they are headstrong and won’t take “no” for an answer.
But let’s think about the long-term effects of what we are doing, of how in the long run this relentless pursuit of beauty only helps to nurture the feelings of inadequacy and un-prettiness that visit and reside with so many girls and young women when they start to believe they can never reach the ultimate standard.
I wonder why we are always in such a rush to turn babies into ladies, to pull the young out of their world of complete self-acceptance into our jaded hemisphere where it’s all about keeping up appearances.
Why don’t we let children be just that? Children.
Sometimes I can’t help but have to say it. We as adults do the future a disservice by being the most vigorous proponents and purveyors of that most punishing pursuit of a completely unattainable ideal.
Beauty.
Personally, I believe that beauty is a concept created to constantly make people believe that they are the embodiment of the otherness of it, hence this tiring chase after what is simply unattainable.
Ah, but you may as well catch the wind.