Helping Your Daughter Embrace Her Inner Beauty

The desire to be popular, pretty, or admired by other people starts early for girls.

Beauty and body image are now common concerns for girls as young as 10 years old. By age 17, 78% report feeling unhappy with their bodies.

My wife and I didn’t have the privilege of raising daughters, but Jean can attest to struggling with feeling comfortable in her own skin as a teen girl.

Truth be told, Eve was the first and only female to experience God’s love and acceptance while living in an environment free of competition with or comparison to anyone else. After the events of Genesis 3, the enemy was at every turn planting lies, doubt, and feelings of inferiority in every female heart.

Does God really love you?

Are you good enough?

Are you missing out on something better?

Girls struggle with these same lies today. This generation of girls and young women can easily waste precious years of their lives trying to look different, trying to be adored by the wrong people, or trying to accomplish objectives that promise everything but that ultimately lead nowhere.

As a tween, Scarlet Hiltibidal never felt like she could measure up or feel happy with herself. By college, Scarlet’s on-again, off-again habit of dieting quickly grew into an eating disorder for 3-1/2 years. Scarlett has even seen the struggle with beauty in her own daughters. Her oldest has brown eyes. At age four, she felt hurt when everyone complimented her baby sister’s bright-blue eyes.

How can parents counter negative messaging from our culture and help their girls find their identity in Christ?

Scarlet Hiltibidal is with us to answer that question on our Focus on the Family Broadcast “Helping Your Daughter Embrace Her Inner Beauty.” She’ll help parents explore how they can play a role in pointing their daughters to the only true source of beauty, acceptance, and happiness – Jesus Christ.

Listen to my conversation with Scarlet on your local radio station, online, on Apple Podcasts, via Google Podcasts, or take us with you on our free phone app.

Scarlet is an author, blogger, speaker, and a wife and mom of three daughters. Her book, He Numbered the Pores on My Face: Hottie Lists, Clogged Pores, Eating Disorders, and Freedom from It All, is a great resource for helping moms and dads “peek behind the curtain” at some of the common struggles their daughters are facing.

I want to put a copy of Scarlet’s book into your hands. For a gift of any amount, we’ll send it out to you as a way of saying thank you for partnering with us to equip parents and strengthen families with the resources they need. For more information, click here, or call 1-800-A-FAMILY (232-6459).

We’ve also got a great magazine for teen girls called Brio Magazine that will help them navigate issues of beauty, acceptance, friendship, and dating – all from a faith-based perspective. We recommend you ask about when you get in touch with us.