be more critical of her looks than she used to be, from going into cardiac arrest over a microscopic pimple to being vaguely aware that she doesn't look the same in leggings as her skinny best friend.

admire older girls (though not necessarily you!) and does little things to try to look like them; at age twelve, Marijean suddenly wanted to use the same shampoo as her quite lovely nineteen-year-old cousin.

begin to compare herself to other girls, especially if they're considered cool.

have firmer likes and dislikes than she used to; purple is no longer just her fave color-she has to wear it.

be torn between your approval of her appearance and that of her BFFs.

react with more volatility to sibling teasing about her appearance than she once did.

What is your role in this new act in your daughter's life? It's a leading one. As soon as she shows interest in what she looks like in any of the above ways, she has already started to form an image of herself as a woman. Anything you do or say in relation to her appearance becomes part of that image.

Even though I was a tween fifty years ago, I think my experience still provides a good example. When I look at pictures of myself from age eight to age twelve, I can see that I could have been a cute kid. Big brown eyes. Freckles dancing across my nose. A big ol' smile. What kept that from being entirely so was my hair. Throughout those five years, my tresses were never more than two inches long, and I am not exaggerating. I had neither the head nor the face for the pixie look, yet every four weeks my mother overrode my protests and took me to the local beauty salon where I was sheared to within an inch of my life. I looked like a boy. I felt like a boy. Worst of all, the other kids teased me about looking like a boy.

In sixth grade when the hormones kicked in, my hair became curly, coinciding with a growth spurt that included my nose. Even from the objective viewpoint of an adult, I still look at those late-tween photos and think, You poor baby. Why did they do that to you?

I eventually grew into myself and won the battle for somewhat longer hair, although until I was out of high school and away at college, it was always (literally) short of what was currently considered stylish, much less feminine. I was in my thirties before I could think of myself as an attractive woman. I'd never had the pleasure of sitting in front of a mirror brushing my hair, or flipping it over my shoulders in coquettish fashion, or piling it into a curled thingie on top of my head for the prom, and somehow that made a difference.

Bless my mother's heart (as we say here in the South), she had no idea she was allowing me to think of myself as gawky and unfeminine. Here's the deal, though: You won't in the end determine how your daughter looks, but you will play the biggest role in influencing how she feels about it.

And that makes all the difference.

4.

What Does She See When She Looks in the Mirror?

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

Psalm 139:14 NIV "My whole life my mom has brought me up telling me how beautiful I am. I think she really does believe it. That doesn't sound stuck-up or anything, does it?"

age 12 The words Marijean said to me that day when she was eleven years old still bring a pang to my mother-heart when I think of them. They're the very words I used in the scenario in this section's introduction.

"I hate my clothes. My hair is stupid. And I never smell good!"

I responded differently than the sample mom. I was, in fact, ecstatic that my child was taking an interest in looking like she actually had a mother, and I whisked her immediately to the mall where we picked out some cute clothes and I let her choose any perfume she wanted. Teen Spirit was, I think, her selection. On the way home we stopped at the drugstore and bought a perm-in-a-box (it was the eighties, remember) and spent the evening doing a makeover. Great fun.

But if I had it to do over again, I would handle it in another way. Because, at the time, I didn't realize that her outburst wasn't really about a sudden interest in her appearance. It was about believing she was ugly-and smelly-and uncool. Given a second chance, I would go there first.

So let's go there now. Many of you already do, but I hope you'll still find information you can use with your beautiful mini-woman.

"Not only does my mom remind me that I'm beautiful on a regular basis (yes, I'm sure she's biased, but it makes me feel good anyway), but she actually has been known to say to my dad or friends at an occasion where I'm dressed up, 'Doesn't our daughter look beautiful tonight?'"

age 12

Getting Clear: Her Beauty Challenges

As I've said, every tween girl eventually notices that the way she looks matters. It's normal, healthy, and usually delightful. The dream of shopping together, doing hair, and painting toenails is what makes a lot of moms want to have a little girl in the first place.

What keeps it from being "the funnest thing ever," as the mini-women themselves would put it, are actually two things: 1. The current Beauty Culture, and 2. Its implantation of a skewed physical self-image.

Right now, you are the one person in your daughter's life who can get her through her tweenhood with a clear, accurate, lovely concept of herself as a young woman. You still have that kind of influence. It's so strong that you can also unknowingly lead her to one that's distorted, self-critical, and exquisitely painful. Fortunately it isn't overwhelmingly difficult to do the former, as long as you start out understanding these six things.

1. What the beauty culture is

As I've mentioned before, your daughter would have to be growing up in a cave for her not to be aware of what is currently considered beautiful. The standards for beauty change, as we all know from looking at pictures of our grandmothers, mothers, and even ourselves when young and fashion-conscious. In the thirties my mother was all about hats and straight, mid-calf skirts. In the early seventies I wore miniskirts so mini I won't show those pictures to the teen girls I mentor! If you grew up in the eighties you knew that big hair, big shoulder pads, and even bigger earrings made a woman look fabulous. (I kind of wish we'd go back to shoulder pads; they make your waist look smaller...) If you go even further back to the Raphaelite period, plump, fleshy, voluptuous women were considered the most magnificent. I want to know when we're going to return to that.

Unfortunately, today's societal image of "beautiful" is impossible for about 98 percent of women. Flawlessly thin-we're talking maybe 14 percent body fat. C or D-cup breasts-and if you know anyone who naturally has a bosom like that on an otherwise skeletal body, you get out more than I do. Thick, straight, ultra-shiny hair-make it blonde-cascading down the back with nary a hint of a split end. Lips so full they could be used as fold-out couches. Nails that owe their perfection to a weekly manicure. And the ultimate: perfect teeth in a blinding shade of white that does not exist in nature.

Nobody looks like that. Models in magazines who appear to look like that don't look like that. Cindy Crawford is reported to have said, "I don't even wake up looking like Cindy Crawford!" Photoshop is a miraculous thing. That photo of me on the back cover? I told the photographer not to touch up anything. Except the teeth. Could he just de-yellow those teeth a little? I drink a lot of tea...

"My mom didn't really teach me about being modest. I just grew up with that. She never wore yuck clothes or anything, so I saw that and compared it to other ladies who did-and was like, 7 don't want to do that.'"

age 12 We all agree that it's ridiculous to expect ourselves to resemble anything close to that standard. But there it is in our faces all the time. Don't think your daughter doesn't notice it too. In the Beauty Workshop that I often do with tweens, I ask them to go through magazines and tear out pictures of what are considered beautiful girls. Together they make a collage-and then they enumerate everything I've outlined above. I ask them, "Do you see anybody in this room who fits the bill?" There is much giggling, because of course most of them are still hipless and have no bra in their near futures. "Does this mean we're not beautiful?" I ask. There is a resounding, "No!"

Ask that of a group of teenage girls and the response will be quite different. Hence the urgency for you to get to your tween daughter before she loses sight of how absurd society's expectations are and actually starts trying to live up to them. Even if she's just in middle school, you may have some catching up to do. Remember what it was like for you in fifth, sixth, and seventh grades when it came to the way you looked. Then multiply that times ten to account for your faded memory and the way times have changed. That will give you some clue to what she's facing.

The good news is that there have been some improvements in the modeling industry, which is the main perpetuator of the impossibly thin beauty image. After three South American models died of anorexia-related health problems in 2006, Spanish and Italian fashion organizations banned models with a body-mass index under 18 (anything under 18.5 is considered unhealthy). Spanish government officials and designers have also agreed not to show clothing under a size 6 in shop windows.1 The bad news? The US has a way to go to catch up to that wisdom. While some models themselves are taking on the mission to make American modeling healthier, many agencies continue to demand more gauntness. Says one agency owner, "I'm dying to find kids who are too thin. I've got forty-two models in my agency, and I'm trying to get them to lose weight. In fact, I wish they'd come down with some anorexia."2 Again, the trickle-down effect reaches our tweens. Studies show that girls as young as five already understand a woman's body is supposed to be perfect. By age nine, they begin to compare their bodies to the standard and see how they measure up. "Indeed," say Elium and Elium, "as many as 80 percent of nine-year-old suburban girls are concerned about dieting and their weight."3 "I wish my mom understood what the pressure is today to look like a starving model," one reader wrote to me. She was twelve.

Where are they getting this?

That leads us to the second thing you'll want to understand.

2. The influence adults have on the beauty culture

We're shocked when our young daughters think they're fat at age eight, or pick out clothes on the rack most of us moms consider provocative, or "desperately want to wear makeup," as one ten-year-old told me. But as Howe and Strauss put it in their book Millennials Rising: "Few adults express any particular shock at the thirty-year-olds who write it, the fifty-year-olds who produce it, or the seventy-year-olds whose portfolios profit by it."4 They're speaking, of course, of the film industry, although the same can be said of almost all media. It isn't the kids who are setting themselves up to fail in the looks department. It's the very adults who ought to be protecting them. They are the ones sending the messages that affect girls' self-image and, unfortunately, their self-worth-and those messages are everywhere. Blasting loudly from television commercials supposedly selling soap, cereal, or dog food, for Pete's sake. Plastered on billboards daughters can't miss from the backseat of the car. Kids' programs where the girl characters are already svelte. Magazines that carry more ads for cosmetics and fashion than articles.4 Again, try as you might, you're hard-pressed to shield your daughter from every medium that sends the message: "Honey, if you don't look like this, you better either get hot, or give up."

3. The influence of their peers

We've already talked (probably to death!) about the power of "the other kids," and that influence extends into matters of appearance. It's natural for a tween girl to measure herself against her girl peers. We all did it when we were growing up. Linda Porter (I can still see her face) was always the prettiest girl from third grade up, and I always knew I wasn't as adorable as she was (not with my hairdo!). But I don't remember a crowd of girls that made the rest of us feel like pond scum. I'm afraid things are different now. We'll discuss girl politics more in section four. For now, just know that these kinds of thoughts are bound to enter your daughter's mind: Her hair is way blonder than mine.

She's got longer eyelashes than I do.

My clothes aren't as cute as hers.

She doesn't have to wear stupid glasses like I do.

That's fairly normal. What isn't is the importance the results of those comparisons seems to have these days. Tweens wanting highlights in their hair. Angling for mascara. Begging for contact lenses. The things of which teenagers used to be the sole proprietors have invaded the tween world, where they're far too young to be fixated on what they look like-even though they aren't going to look anything like what they look like now in a year or two.

Boys aren't usually much help here either. Girls this age often tell me they don't care what the boys think, but they can't help hearing them because they're so loud. If you have sons too, you know that as they're going through their own prepubescent stuff, a lot of them think they have to be funny all the time-in a way far different than what cracks up a girl and her BFFs. Tween boys think it's hilarious to call a girl Helen Keller when she gets glasses or hold his nose when she stands next to him. Even though any self-respecting tween girl will tell you a boy like that is just an ALC (Absurd Little Creep), she is likely to have her feelings hurt-and her self-image taken down a notch or two.

4. The effect you have on her

"I've never thought about what my mom thinks I look like. She's never told me outright, ' I think you're beautiful.' Since I dance, we talked one day about who had a dancer's body. When I said I didn't, she didn't deny it or try to make me feel better about it. She just kind of ignored the comment."

age 12 The mistake I most regret in raising my daughter is that I modeled a harmful body perception for her. I'm not thrilled about sharing this with you because it describes me at my worst, but I'm doing it because it's so incredibly important that you know the power your example can have.

I was in my thirties when Marijean was a tween of nine and ten. Jim and I were both in school earning theater degrees, which meant involvement in the Nevada Repertory Theater as well as classes and homework. We were both working part-time jobs to support our little family, and we were running a professional nonprofit children's theater. I was also trying to keep my still-budding writing career afloat. I know. Crazy. The stress began to whittle away at my weight, and somehow I got the idea that in the midst of the chaos of my life, this might be one thing I could control.

So I lived on Diet Coke and Slim-Fast during the day, was obsessive about doing a daily one-hour Jane Fonda workout, rode my bike everywhere instead of driving the car, and ate a dinner with my family each evening that was barely more than Gandhi consumed. At my then five-foot-seven frame, I got down to 111 pounds. Pictures of me from that era show me gaunt and drawn. The only things that "stuck out" on my body were my bones.

I actually thought I was keeping my anorexic habits nicely concealed. Many people complimented me on my slim figure, which made me even more determined to lose another pound or two. No one said, "Are you okay? You look like you were just released from a concentration camp." Jim expressed some concern, but he was as wrapped up in our frenetic life as I was, so he was easily reassured by my insistence that I felt great.

It seems that Marijean was the only one who noticed. I didn't learn until years later that she knew the container I'd pulled the label off of and called "protein powder" was really Slim-Fast. That she was aware of my frowning every time I looked in the mirror. That she heard my muttered comments to myself about "feeling fat." She's told me since then that she would look in her own mirror, at her healthy, robust, ten-year-old's body, and think, If Mom thinks she's fat, she must think I'm Jabba the Hutt.

In addition to her early molestation, that was another reason for her choice of baggy sweaters and sweatshirts, her agony over putting on a swimsuit, her I-give-up-I'm-a-couch-potato attitude when anyone suggested sports. All that before she was eleven years old.

Although I only remained in full anorexic mode for two years, and didn't do any serious damage to my body except cause the early onset of osteoporosis, I maintained what my gifted therapist Glenda Allen calls "anorexic-style thinking." So did Marijean. When she became a teenager, she got on a roller coaster of weight gain and loss, with a cloud of self-deprecation always over her head, that lasted until she was twenty-five years old. And yet through it all she has been and still is a beautiful young woman with a stunning figure. I take responsibility for the fact that she has seldom been able to enjoy it.

"It's not what you do or even what you say about her that makes the difference," Glenda Allen told me. "It's what you say about yourself."

Enough said.

5. The effect Christianity has on her

I recently spoke at a mother-daughter tea, held at a lovely church where all the moms and tween girls were dressed to the nines and had their hair curled and their nails polished and their purses hung stylishly over their shoulders. I was licking my chops, because the topic they'd asked me to speak on was "Inner Beauty."

"How many of you have ever been told that it doesn't matter what you look like on the outside?" I asked them.

Many hands went up. So far so good.

"How many of you believed it?" I asked next.

Every hand stayed up. In fact, a few additional ones were raised.

Okay. That was not the response I expected.

Thinking the girls were only giving the reaction they thought their moms wanted them to give, I told the mothers to close their eyes, and then I asked the question again. The girls looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights as they glanced nervously at each other and then at their temporarily sightless mothers. About half of them kept their hands up. The other half looked like they were about to cry.

Everything in me wanted to shout, "It's okay to be honest!"

Did they really, truly believe that what you look like on the outside doesn't matter at all? Or were they parroting what they'd been taught by these same Christian women who could have gone from the tea to a photo shoot and been paid as models?

That actually shouldn't have been a surprise to me. I've seen it over and over again in workshops, at events, in online discussions. Well-meaning Sunday school teachers and youth pastors and conscientious moms seem to have misinterpreted for tweens the scriptural passages that pertain to outward appearance.

In Matthew 6:25, for instance, Jesus says, "If you decide for God, living a life of God-worship, it follows that you don't fuss about...whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far more to your life...than the clothes you hang on your body." Christian adults tell their wide-eyed listeners, "That means your clothes don't count at all." That's a little confusing when the adults delivering the message are in full fashionable regalia. Besides, it doesn't mean that anyway. Jesus is saying, "Clothes aren't all that you are. They're not even the most important thing about you. But they're there to be dealt with, nevertheless." If she doesn't get that, the tween girl emerges from Sunday school feeling like she's a total sinner because she does care what she's wearing-or she figures, "Oh well, I guess I'm rotten to the core, so I might as well give up trying to be a good Christian."

The birds of the air and the lilies of the field often lead to similar misinterpretations and confusion (Matthew 6:26-30). Jesus says, "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness" (Matthew 6:33 NIV, emphasis mine). He doesn't say, "And while you're doing it, go ahead and dress like a slob and let your hair turn into a rat's nest." In 1 Peter 3:3-4, we're told that our "beauty should not come from outward adornment...Instead, it should be that of your inner self" (NIV). He's telling us that God is more interested in how we live than in how we dress. That doesn't translate into what some girls are hearing from their teachers: that it's wrong to even think about "outward adornment." At all. That they're vain to give it a thought. I don't see that in there. I hear the passage saying that beauty does matter a great deal-that we are to have the "unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God's sight." Beauty doesn't come from a trendy haircut and some lip gloss, but beauty needs to be there nevertheless.