Is My Teen Too Focused on Her Looks?

The Ask Lisa Podcast does not constitute medical advice and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have concerns about your child’s well-being, consult a physician or mental health professional.

The following transcript has been automatically generated by an AI system and should be used for informational purposes only. We cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided.

Reena Ninan:
My almost 14-year-old daughter seems entirely consumed by her appearance. How do you tell when they’ve crossed the line and it’s too much infatuation with your looks?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
There’s a kid who’s enjoying looking at her appearance. Then there’s the kid who’s taking suggestive selfies in the mirror. This is not a girl problem. This is sort of equal opportunity.

Reena Ninan:
This is really something that could have lasting effects?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Here’s where it can really be a problem.

Reena Ninan:
I’m always obsessed with moisturizers this time of year, and I’m starting to use oils on my face. It’s been a cold winter, Lisa. Very cold winter.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Speaking for Cleveland, I will agree. I sort of feel like I need an emollient holster. I need a belt that has my chapstick and my aquaphor and my face location. I just feel so dry all the time and it’s not my favorite. Not my favorite. Yeah.

Reena Ninan:
It’s interesting. I’m also curious about how we present ourselves in front of our kids when it comes to makeup and all this stuff. And the letter we got today is talking about looks. And so I want to dig deep into this. I’m going to go ahead and read this to you, Lisa, and I want to get your take.
Dear Dr. Lisa, I’m writing with growing concern about my almost 14-year-old daughter. Over the past several months, she seems entirely consumed by her appearance. She spends hours in front of the mirror constantly taking selfies. Some of them even look somewhat suggestive, and the sheer volume has become alarming. It feels like this is an obsession with how she looks and it’s taken over her life. She gets a lot of positive reinforcement for her appearance. She and I are often told how beautiful she is. We’ve always tried to instill the values of kindness, intelligence, and the importance of contributing to the world. While we know it’s normal for teens to care about their looks, this seems extreme. She’s given up reading, writing, things she used to enjoy, and I worry she’s equating her self-worth solely with her appearance. She’s very active with her sports hobbies, is a great student and friend, and she is a very social and wonderful kid. As her parents, we’re really struggling. We don’t know how concerned we should be about this fixation, whether it’s part of typical teenage behavior or a sign of something deeper. Most of all, we don’t know how to help her pull back and regain some balance. We want her to feel good about herself and not to lose sight of the things that matter most. How can we guide her through this? Should we be worried that this could have lasting effects? Thank you for any advice you can offer.
So Lisa, how common is this?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I hear it. There’s a lot of elements in this letter that I think a lot of families would resonate to. Kids do become preoccupied with their appearance, especially in adolescents. I remember spending a lot of time looking in the mirror, worrying about this little pimple or whatever it was. So that piece is really typical, right, for kids to be worried about their appearance, invested in their appearance, spend more time on their appearance. I think if we sort of think about what’s in the normal range, we fully expect that in adolescence. This letter seems to be talking about something that’s more than that. That this kid is spending a lot of time. And interesting in this letter, it’s also clear getting a lot of reinforcement for how she looks. I was so struck by the line of people telling her and us how beautiful she is. That’s not always the story.
And that sort of takes this up another level in terms of what to do about how invested this kid is in her appearance right now, especially when she’s getting all this feedback that other people are too.

Reena Ninan:
We did this episode, “Do I tell my daughter she’s beautiful?” And this kind of feels like a continuation of that conversation where parents are struggling with, how do you tell when they’ve crossed the line and it’s too much infatuation with your looks? Is there anything, a marker, anything that you can help us when you’ve got to reign it back?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, it is such an interesting question, and I’m so glad we did that earlier episode because we care about girls and young women being seen as whole and valued and valuable people separate from their appearance.That’s of course a value you hold, I hold. And yet, you’ve got a daughter. I’ll look at my girls and be like, “Oh my gosh, you look so cute.” I’ll say things like that. And I still say things like that. And so I think there’s a tension that loving parents navigate about taking pleasure in just the adorableness of our very own children and sharing that with them. And yet at the same time, not wanting to reinforce the idea that it’s all about your looks and your appearance is what really matters. I do think, to your question of how do you make sure it doesn’t go over a line? I’m not going to say we should not ever talk about appearance and we should not admire our kids’ appearance. We should spend no time on our own appearance. I’m not going to say that. I do think it’s important that there be a healthy balance between enjoying and taking pleasure and taking good care of oneself. I mean, Reena, I love putting on makeup. I love getting put together and remembering that it’s really what’s on the inside that counts. That’s the tension we’re always wanting to navigate.

Reena Ninan:
I feel like our mothers’ generation, you would never walk out and like sweatpants and not have combed your hair or put makeup on or like my mother is always like, “You’re going out like that?” Like, “Yes, I’m wearing my sweats in a baseball cap.”
But is there anything we need to keep in mind in how we talk about our looks in the way that we’ve talked about food or eating?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I love that. Well, okay. So just first of all, just to think about what you’re saying, one of the things I love about today’s adolescent girls is they do seem to have a lot more comfort with showing the world various sides of themselves, right? Showing up at school, right?

Reena Ninan:
True. True.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Totally makeupless and low key. And then for whatever reason on another day, totally putting themselves together. And I’m watching this in my own house that my kid will some days be like, they’re getting this version. And then another day, I can tell she’s enjoyed spending some time on her look or her outfit or wearing jewelry or something. I don’t feel like that’s the adolescence I remember. I remember feeling much more on stage all the time as a teenager than I feel like certainly the kids in my life and I’m around are. Do you feel like you’re seeing that too where there’s more latitude for kids on this or girls maybe?

Reena Ninan:
I do. And I feel like I remember being in middle school and putting eyeliner and mascara. And I can see a little bit of that in my daughter’s age group, but it just seems different now. But it does feel like appearance is everything and how you present yourself because of this era of social media.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It can be, right? And then kids can work really hard on it. And I think that that’s … It’s interesting, this letter also brings up like she’s taking these selfies, right?

Reena Ninan:
Yes. What do you think about these suggestive selfies? What’s your take on that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, it is interesting because it feels like it goes from being one thing then to another thing. So there’s the kid who’s looking in the mirror, enjoying makeup, looking at her appearance and getting a lot of feedback that she’s an attractive kid. Then there’s the kid who’s taking suggestive selfies in the mirror. Then there may be also be the kid who’s posting those selfies. We can sort of think about these at different levels. The suggestive selfies, those are tough. Does it say in the letter how old she is? Because that seems an important factor.

Reena Ninan:
Yes. She’s 14, so you got to think probably like middle school, beginning of high school possibly.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Right, probably eighth, ninth grade, somewhere in there.

Reena Ninan:
Yep.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah.

Reena Ninan:
Yep.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So Reena, here’s something that I have encountered over the years around suggestive stuff. And I’m actually going to take it back pre-social media. I remember 20 years ago in my practice caring for a family. I actually was parent guidance I was doing with a single mom with a 12-year-old daughter. The mom came in one day pretty worried because she’d happened to walk by her daughter’s room and could see her daughter looking in the mirror and doing these sexy poses into the mirror. So this is like before any of this is being trafficked by social media, like a completely pre-social media era, kind of seeing her daughter doing this kind of adult suggestive posing with her face and her body and the mom being pretty freaked out by this. And we ended up having what I think was a good conversation about how what it means to the kid is not what it means to the adult.
I think we have to try to keep that in mind. As adults, we look at this and we’re like, whoa, this is really sexy. This seems like you’re trying to portray yourself in this way that we bring the fullness of adult understanding of sexuality to it. Kids cannot and do not understand how this stuff comes off. We just need to start there because where we don’t want this to go wrong is for the adult to be like, “Oh my God, you look like a … ” And then fill in the blank, some sexualized term that’s not flattering at all because that will strike kids as like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I saw this thing and I’m just imitating it and I’m doing a good job imitating it. ” They don’t really have the full awareness of how we read this as adults and we don’t want to assume they do.
So I just want to pause on that for a minute because I know it’s so alarming and jarring for adults to even see a kid acting in a suggestive way or putting out a suggestive portrayal of themselves.

Reena Ninan:
That’s a great point to underline that our life experiences aren’t their life experiences at this point. So they’re not seeing it from the same lens that we are through experience. Lisa, what about the phone in her room? What’s your take?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, so you know how I feel about phones in rooms.

Reena Ninan:
I do. I do.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think this is such a good example of why. If she’s in her room using her phone to take and maybe post suggestive selfies, there’s nothing that really makes that strange because she’s in the privacy of her room. In the privacy of the room, kids will do all sorts of things, which I guess is why you have a privacy of your room. I think that the odds of her spending a huge amount of time taking suggestive selfies, if she has to do it in the kitchen or the living room, they go way down. If phones aren’t in bedrooms, and if that’s a rule a family’s ready to make and feels they can make or can make preemptively before the phone ever goes in the room, I think this is another example of where it shuts down all sorts of things that we’re probably better off without.
Whether or not the kid’s posting them, just to have that kind of time to take those kinds of photos goes way down if the phone can’t be in the room.

Reena Ninan:
High school and middle school can be very difficult years to navigate. If this is giving her a little bit of self-confidence, maybe not the suggestive part, but okay, who cares? Is this really something that we have to worry about could have lasting effects?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
The thing I’m thinking about, Reena, is a metaphor I shared in Untangled about kids and self-esteem. The metaphor I shared is the tributaries and the lake. So the way I think about self-esteem, it’s like a lake that needs to be filled. It needs stuff in it. And what we want for kids are lots and lots of tributaries, lots of things that bring a source of pride and self-esteem. Doing well academically, you’re at least feeling good about your academics and having friends and being of service and being a good teammate. It’s not preventable and not necessarily terrible if part of what a person of any age takes pride in is, “I like the way I look and I get some feedback about it even that I am a good looking person.” That’s not the end of the world. Here’s where, to your question about lasting damage, here’s where it can really be a problem.
One is if it’s the major tributary, if the investment in one’s appearance starts to take up so much time and energy, which this letter indicates it’s sort of like bordering on that, it’s taking away some other tributaries because the kid’s not reading, the kid’s not writing. If it starts to crowd out other tributaries, that’s a problem. Kids need lots of tributaries and their looks, okay, fine, can be part of it, but it shouldn’t be the whole thing. The other thing I will say, Reena, and I don’t know if you know women like this, I think it’s changing as people alter themselves so much and appearance is so dealt with so differently these days. One of the things we’ve long recognized when we talk about things like narcissism is that people who are narcissistic need admiration. They need the oxygen of being admired. One of the things I learned in my training and I have watched in real life is sometimes you’ll have an extremely beautiful woman and the world is giving her all this feedback that she’s so gorgeous and she develops her sense of value and worth around that.
And frankly, it goes fine as long as she’s pretty. And then as she starts to age and the world doesn’t give that kind of feedback, if that is her sole source of oxygen for feeling good, she’s in trouble. That’s the worst case scenario, want to prevent this down the line, but I’ve seen it. I’ve seen that happen where looks fade, man, they do. They all always do.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah. But it’s hard to imagine that at the age of 14 when you have been gifted with great looks, right? And it’s hard to see down that turn. But to your point, Lisa, I mean, it’s so true. How at this point though, can they regain some balance? Is it too late?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Definitely not too late. Definitely not too late. So the way I would think about this, okay, you know me in metaphors. I can come up with 17 a minute. Okay. So the way I would think about this is something I wrote about actually in Under Pressure. We’re like trotting out all my books today.

Reena Ninan:
Yay.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. I mean, it’s fun. I mean, this is the beauty of having gotten to think about a lot of these things for a long time. I’ve gotten to distill my thoughts. In my book Under Pressure, which is about stress and anxiety in girls, I put out this metaphor of talking with kids, and this can be true of all kids, not just girls, about their container versus their contents. Okay. So this kid has a really good looking container, right? Not going to fault her for that. It is really important that that be balanced with a focus on her contents, right? A focus on who she is inside, the kind of person she is, the skills she’s developing, the way she contributes to the world. What I like about the container contents metaphor is that it gives us a language for talking with kids that’s not critical. It’s not like, “Oh my God, stop looking at yourself in the mirror, go shovel the driveway.” It gives us a way of saying things like, “Kiddo, you got a cute container.” And I think this is also a great moment to say, “And lucky you, that just happened. You actually don’t get a whole lot of credit for that. That is the hand you were dealt, but what really matters is your contents, the things you control, the things you build, the things you make, the choices you make about how to be in the world. Containers, great, they come, they go, they change over time. It’s your contents that you control and it’s your contents that I want you to focus on.” So what do you think of that?

Reena Ninan:
Sometimes it’s hard for kids to sort of grasp that and understand it in the moment. I feel like I’m talking at them, but not with them, right? To where it’ll get through to them.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think you’re right. I think that she might be like, “Pass the eyeliner.” She might be like, “Oh my God.” She may even be like, “You don’t get it.” Or she may even be like, “A middle-aged lady, don’t you wish you had what I had?” She may feel like you’re diminishing my beauty because you’re on the later end of what our culture celebrates. So I think you’re right. I think words will only go so far. I don’t think they’re worth not saying. I think you can still sort of say your piece, but it gets to something else, which is make this kid busy. Help this kid be busy. Minimize the amount of time that she can spend in front of the mirror.

Reena Ninan:
Such a great point. So as we pull back and look at looks, I feel like there are many different versions of this in how you look at your muscles or how you show up on social media. So how do you get us into the head space of when we think they’ve become a little bit too obsessive of their appearance, regardless of what it is, how can you retool things quickly?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, this is important. You brought up boys. I will actually tell you, yes, I worry about girls. I worry about girls who are spending too much time trying to cultivate appearance that the world’s going to admire. Things are going on with boys that have not been going on in the past. And a lot of it is around appearance and a lot of it is around muscularity and losing body fat. And like you say, a lot of it is driven by social media. Just to sort of play this out a little bit. So we’ve got this girl version of this cute kid spending a lot of time putting on makeup and looking in the mirror and taking suggestive photos. The boy version that I am hearing is guys spending a lot of time at the gym, a lot of time worrying about what they eat, and a lot of time also looking in the mirror, looking at their bodies, taking photos of their bodies, sometimes posting those photos of their bodies.
So this is not like a “girl problem,” right? The idea that the culture could tell you you’re supposed to look a certain way and then you’re going to spend a lot of time on this because you’re a teenager and this is something that you can be very vulnerable to. This is sort of equal opportunity.
To your question of like, when should you worry? How do you know? I mean, I really think if you feel at all like your kids’ worries about their appearance are getting in the way of them growing in other ways. When we think about health and young people, what we want to see is progressive development across the board. We want to see them taking better care of themselves all the time, getting better and better at managing their self-care. So that’s, I guess, one version of this, the boys piece and also the girls piece at times, kids of all gender, they can start to take very bad care of themselves in the name of what they think is appearance, but we want to see them also developing as students and we want to see them developing in their friendships and we want to see them developing in their ability to be of use to their community and their family.
So if you feel like, “Oh, wait a minute, these other tributaries, these other ways that they can grow and should be feeling good about themselves are being compromised because so much of their energy is caught up in how they look,” then it’s time to worry. And then to my point about this girl, then it’s time to actually be like, “You know what? I need you to be helping down at the church.” Or, “Here’s the activities that your school has this season. You can choose which ones you want, but you’re doing at least one or two of these.” Requiring kids to be useful in the world, to do things in the world, to build skills in the world for two reasons. One, to crowd out how much time they can spend worrying about their looks, and two, to build other tributaries for self-esteem, because even if they’re good looking, whatever, it’s going to fade.

Reena Ninan:
I love those other tributaries.That’s just such an analogy that always works all the time. I love that one. Before we go, I want to ask you, what if these suggestive selfies, if she’s actually going ahead and posting them, is there anything parents should be concerned about with that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, we don’t love that, right? I mean, if I or you saw that, I think we might be a little uneasy about it. I think that’s a conversation that needs to be had. It may be very normed, right? Any kid who’s doing this, whether it’s a girl posting suggestive selfies or frankly, a boy posting a photo of his six pack that he took a photo of in the mirror in his bathroom, it may be very, very normed for them to do it. What it reminds me of actually, Reena, is the four Rs that we were talking about with regard to kids not scrolling while studying. I think if we don’t want kids doing this, we have to go back to the four R’s of how you change behavior in teenagers. Number one, start with respect. So we might say, “Look, I know you’re seeing a lot of kids doing this. I get why it feels like it’s an okay thing to do,” so that’s respect.
Then rationale, that’s the rationale for why we don’t want them to do that. Okay, that may be very specific to your family. That may be specific to something, you might say, “This isn’t really how we present ourselves, or this doesn’t feel okay.” You need a rationale that you can justify and explain to your kid. And so then you can make a rule. I don’t want you putting up photos that are about displaying your body or displaying your appearance. If you want to put up photos of your game, fine, but ones that are entirely focused on a look at me aren’t I cute or fit, that’s not how we roll. And then fourth R, expect some resistance like, “Oh!” the kid’s going to be grumpy about it. That’s fine. As long as they can comply to the rule, they can be grumpy about the rule.
That may be a way to wade into this question of kids posting photos that adults just kind of that don’t sit right with us.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah. I know you talk about healthy tension, but this is a tension that I feel I do not like. So what do you have for us, Lisa, for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I was thinking about that part of the letter where the parent mentions that the parents also getting feedback on this child being very attractive. It reminds me of something I came up with when my daughters were little, and I just want people to have it, should it be handy. When my daughters were little, sometimes when we’d be out and about, people like, “Oh my God, she’s so cute.” Or, “Oh my God, she’s so adorable.” And I was always kind of torn because I thought so too. And also I don’t want to right in front of my kid be like, “Well, yes, she is.” I didn’t know what to say. And so then finally one day I struck upon saying, “And she’s great on the inside too,” is how I started responding. So I just want to offer that to families because it felt like it kind of threaded the needle of not wanting to make the moment weird, but also not wanting to double down on this being the most important thing about my kids.
So for what it’s worth, that’s how I ended up solving that problem.

Reena Ninan:
That’s a great way to solve it because you also remind people of what really matters and sometimes we need a little reminding on that. Well, thank you, Lisa. I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.