Hello, my beautiful girl, I cooed to my baby daughter as I picked her up out of her carseat.

Then, out of nowhere, someone quipped, You don’t want to tell her that too often or she’ll get a big head.

Wait…what? I thought as a record audibly screeched in my head. 

I may have only six months of motherhood under my belt, but there’s something I know for certain: Your average girl living in the 21st century does not get told she’s beautiful often enough to result in a big head. In fact, the opposite happens.

In this age of social media, girls are inundated daily with the message that they are not good enough—their bodies, their hair, their smiles, their skin, their lips, their nails—they’re not good enough. Combine that with the pervasive message that, Little girl, someday Prince Charming will come riding in on his white horse and finally recognize all your beauty and, with his love, assign you all the worth you’ve been secretly longing for your entire life … and we have a major, major disaster on our hands.

No wonder girls become image-obsessed. No wonder girls end up in unhealthy relationships, wasting their timing on boys who have no intention of loving them sacrificially. No wonder they develop anxiety, live their lives on social media and obsess over every picture, like and comment. 

Wanting my daughter to have an ingrained understanding that she is beautiful is similar to my desire for her to understand that her worth is in Christ (2 Cor. 5:21). When a believer knows that his or her worth has been determined by Christ, they are set free to live—and live freely! They are no longer crippled by the fear of wondering if God loves them, if they’re holy enough, if they’re doing enough to please him. They know that God sees his beloved, perfect son when he looks upon them and thus they are free to live in obedience to God with joy, confidence and peace. Something similar happens when a young girl knows that she is beautiful, valued and loved. And that’s the thing—I don’t just want my daughter to think she’s physically beautiful (though she is). I also want her to know that she is deeply valued and unbelievably loved.

While some might argue that we should encourage our girls to ignore beauty altogether and focus on “less worldly” things, I don’t think we can. We live in a world that is obsessed with the idea of beauty. Rather than teaching our daughters to not care about beauty, I think it’s our responsibility to help them cultivate a proper understanding of it—in all its forms.

Our society does a poor job of explaining what beauty really is—a virtue, not an asset. Beauty is a complex, multi-faceted virtue that ultimately has the power to draw our souls upward toward the divine. Simply put: Beauty is more than skin deep. 

So…how can we help our daughters cultivate a healthy understanding of beauty from the beginning? 

Telling your daughter she’s beautiful is a great place to start. When we make beauty a safe and familiar idea, when we take it off the screen, out of social media and place it in the context of a loving home, we change the game. It’s not this intangible, ever-elusive thing that girls need to chase after or wait for some dumb boy from their middle school to bestow upon them. They’ve already got it. They’re operating from a place of it.

A few ideas: 

First, talk to your daughter about true beauty—the beauty of heaven, creation, pure love, even God himself. Help her to see that beauty is more than skin deep and talk about what it means to be beautiful inside.

Second, help your daughter develop a safe and healthy understanding of physical beauty. When I think about my own association with physical beauty, I think about how I rarely saw my mom wear makeup. Now, makeup is by no means a sin, but I learned that makeup isn’t a necessary component of beauty. As a girl, I thought my mom was so beautiful (and still do). Because I never saw her embarrassed to go somewhere without a full face of makeup, I didn’t make a strong association between makeup and beauty. My mom, just as herself, was beautiful to me and it helped me learn that I could be beautiful by just being myself. 

Beauty isn’t something that has to be recreated in the bathroom mirror every morning. It’s innate. You are beautiful and so is your daughter. Model that for her and celebrate that with her. 

Third and finally, help your daughter develop confidence, which goes hand in hand with feeling beautiful. Speak lovingly and confidently about your own physical beauty and model that for your daughter. Help her to view eating and exercise as ways to celebrate and love her body well rather than means to punish it and right “wrongs” (i.e., last night’s second bowl of ice cream). Confidence helps a girl hold her head high in gym class, in front of her debate team, as she says “no” to peer pressure and as she decides whether to say “yes” to the kid who just asked her out. 

During a particularly rough patch in middle school, I remember riding in my mom’s minivan as we drove up the hill to our house. It was a sunny day, but I was hunched over, staring out the window like a moody teenager in a movie waiting for the rain to start falling. I don’t remember why, but I felt ugly to my core.

The song “Messiah” (or “You’re Beautiful”) by Phil Wickham came on the radio and, though it’s a song about the beauty of the Messiah, when you’re a teenage girl you tend to think a lot of things are about you. I remember the chorus line “You’re beautiful” stung, because of how ugly I felt in that moment.

At some point during the song, my mom and sister (sitting in the passenger seat) looked at me and said something along the lines of “Soph, I think you’re beautiful” and it made me cry. Somehow, they saw the silent, secret pain I was carrying and they acknowledged it and it mattered. It didn’t solve my problems overnight, but I think back on that moment as a time when someone I loved told me I was beautiful—not before a school dance when I expected to be told that I was beautiful, but in an ordinary, difficult moment when I felt ugly in my soul.

Thinking about my own daughter, it pains me to know that there will come a day when she thinks harshly of herself. But I rejoice knowing that God has given me the special privilege of being her mom and being able to tell her that I see her, I love her and I think she is beautiful.