I Sometimes Think My Kid Is Ugly: What No One Tells You About This Unspoken Parenting Thought
I was leaning against a splintered aluminum bleacher after my 7-year-old Leo’s Saturday soccer game, when the group of moms next to me started passing around a phone full of candid game photos. One woman held up the screen, squinting, and laughed. “Look at Leo mid-yell,” she said. “Total chaos.” I leaned in, and before I could stop it, a sharp, uninvited thought popped into my head: He looks kind of ugly right now.
The thought hit me so fast I took a step back. What kind of mother thinks that about her own kid? I laughed along with the group, said something about him never holding a neutral face, but the thought stuck with me all the way to the car, where Leo was in the backseat shoveling cheddar Goldfish into his mouth, crumbs sticking to the fuzz on his oversized sweatshirt.
It’s not the first time, either. When I picked up his elementary school photo packet last month, I spread the prints out on the kitchen counter and stared for a minute before the same thought pricked me. His permanent front tooth grew in crookedly after baby teeth fell out too early, and it sticks out past his lower lip. His nose is still a little squished from being six weeks early, and his hair grows in so thick it sticks up at the crown no matter how much gel I smear on it. In the photo, he’s squinting into the sun, and none of it fits the soft, symmetrical idea of “cute kid” I’ve seen a thousand times online, in commercials, even in other people’s holiday cards.
I brought it up to my sister a week later, over iced coffee. She’s a third grade teacher, and she sighed and said she hears this all the time, just never out loud. Parents will pull her aside before school photos and ask if she can ask the photographer to angle away from their kid’s crooked teeth or acne, or joke that their preteen is just “so awkward right now” they can’t wait for the growth spurt to be over. She told me something that stuck: Brains just compare. You see a hundred perfectly edited kid photos a day, your brain’s gonna do the math automatically. That doesn’t make you a bad parent. It just makes you a person who lives in the world we live in.
That conversation got me thinking about what to actually do with these thoughts, once you stop drowning in guilt. The first non-negotiable rule I made for myself is I never say anything even close to this out loud around Leo, or any kid. But beyond that, beating myself up for having the thought doesn’t help anyone. It just makes me avoid thinking about it, which means I don’t do the small work of unlearning the generic beauty standards that popped that thought into my head in the first place.
I started with two small, concrete changes that take almost no extra time. First, I stopped using vague words like “cute,” “pretty,” or “handsome” to describe Leo, or any kid, when he’s around. Instead, I use specific observations tied to him, not some generic standard. If he asks how he looks before school, I don’t say “you look so handsome.” I say “That dinosaur shirt you picked out looks awesome – it matches your scuffed-up boots from climbing the oak tree.” If he grins at me after telling a bad joke, I don’t say “what a cute smile.” I say “I love how wide you smile – that crooked tooth makes your grin totally one of a kind.”
The second thing I do is, when that uninvited ugly thought pops up, I pause for 10 seconds and name three little unique things I love about his face. It’s a tiny, silly exercise, no big meditation or anything. For me, that list is always the same: the tiny white scar on his left eyebrow from when he face-planted off his tricycle at 4, the way his left eye crinkles twice as much as his right when he laughs so hard he snorts, the tiny brown freckle right on the tip of his squished nose. By the time I name them, that stupid automatic comparison thought is gone, because I’m not looking at him through some generic standard anymore. I’m looking at him.
A couple of weeks ago, Leo came home from school with his chin tucked into his chest, and said a boy in his class called him buck-tooth. Normally I would’ve babbled something about how you’re so beautiful, don’t listen to him, which is what I was taught to say. But instead I tried the thing I’d been practicing. I sat down next to him on the couch and said, “Yeah, your front tooth does stick out a lot more than most kids’ teeth. It’s one of the first things I notice about you, and I’d know that smile anywhere in a crowded room.” He blinked at me for a second, then said he was hungry and asked for a peanut butter sandwich. That was it. No big cry, no big speech. He got over it faster than I would’ve if I’d made a big deal out of it.
I still get that thought sometimes, if I’m being honest. Last week I looked at the preview for our family holiday photos, and there it was again, quick as a flash. I don’t let it hang around anymore, though. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me for having it, either. We all carry this unspoken baggage about what people are supposed to look like, and it doesn’t just disappear because you had a kid.
I don’t have this all figured out. I worry sometimes that I’m still passing on weird ideas about looks without meaning to, that I’ll mess this up somehow. But right now, Leo still runs to the mirror every morning to make silly faces at himself, he still grins so wide his whole face crinkles when he scores a goal, he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t look like the kids in the ads. That’s enough for me, for now.
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