I hustle my daughter into the dance studio and quickly help her get her tap shoes on. She slips happily into the studio and begins dancing with her friends. The teacher plays cute songs and they run around with scarves. After a time, they switch out to their ballet shoes and practice their routine for the upcoming recital. It’s really damn cute and my daughter is having a blast. She loves it all — the music, the fun she has with her peers, and of course, the glittery outfits.
I see some of the older ballerinas walk past me in their practice gear, water bottles in hand. They file into another studio and begin warming up. They’re probably somewhere between 12 and 15 years old. It’s hard to tell because of their dancers’ physiques. You guessed it — thin, wiry, bird-boned. Someday my daughter will be ready for that class, I think.
Then… my heart sinks. I think of myself at that age, how I didn’t want to wear the spandex shorts that were part of our volleyball. Even though I weighed about a hundred pounds less than I do now, I was bigger-boned and larger-framed than the rest of my team. To put it simply, I spent four years feeling fat compared to the other girls, despite the fact that I was stronger, could jump higher, and fight longer than most of them. All I saw was that I was the biggest, and I had to wear spandex in front of the whole school.
Would my daughter feel the same way about her body as I did?
Was this to be my daughter’s fate as well, no matter which sport she played, but especially in this particular activity with its emphasis on aesthetics?
My daughter is growing up with both a mom and a dad who work in education. Granted, we are both in secondary positions, but we understand the importance of educational research and how that can be used to track what makes kids ultimately successful in life. One thing we definitely agree on is the concept of extra curricular activities having a strong positive correlation to post high school success. So of course as soon as I found out I was pregnant we started planning out what kinds of activities we wanted to enroll our child in.
The obvious choice was sports. My family is very athletic though I myself am not terribly so. My mom was a state champion basketball player and my brother played on his college team. I merely achieved a starting position on the varsity volleyball squad in high school, but my husband was a tennis champ.
However, the earliest sport experience I could find for my daughter that was local and affordable was youth soccer. Unfortunately it didn’t start until kindergarten. But as a two and three year old I still wanted her to get started with an activity. The only option that I could find aside from private lessons of some kind was to enroll her in a dance academy in their class for itty bitty dancers called Creative Movement. Now she’s in Childrens’ Dance 2 and still has big dreams of appearing in the dance school’s yearly production of The Nutcracker. Yet, I can’t help but wonder if she’ll ever get there.
I have no way of knowing how my daughter’s body will change as she grows up
Right now she’s pretty tall for her age, but she’s still very slender and her bone structure seems average. Maybe she’ll have all the natural gifts of a ballerina — we know she’s got the height covered, as I am six feet tall. But is it worth it to set her up for this kind of agonizing failure? Would her body structure really prevent her from reaching her peak as a dancer?
Being the biggest girl on the volleyball team was troubling to me because of the constant fat-phobic messages I’d absorbed through the media and my peers. It did nothing to prevent me from being good at volleyball, and maybe even helped. I don’t know enough about dance to know if a person’s physique really does prevent them from doing the physical acts that the art form requires, or if dance companies just don’t hire plus sized ballerinas because of discrimination. So, admittedly, there is a lot I don’t know about this possible future where she starts to hate her body because of dance.
Letting her take the lead
However, if I could spare her the pain of such an experience, I absolutely would. Why risk it? She’s old enough for youth soccer now — maybe I should ditch the tap shoes and leotards and strap her into some cleats instead. The only risk, I suppose, is taking her away from something she loves because I’m trying to protect her.
I guess at this point all I can do is watch and wait, and be sure that we are having body positivity talks as much as possible. I hope that with an open line of communication my daughter will come to me with any struggles or fears that she has related to her physical appearance. And isn’t that what all moms want?
