Princess Lessons: Live Your Dream

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“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair . . .”

When I was a little girl, I always wanted long hair like Rapunzel’s but I lacked the patience to let it grow. When my hair reached halfway down my back, I started begging to have it cut. Poppet, at the age of four, is well on her way to having Rapunzel-length hair When wet, it reaches her bum. (In addition to living vicariously through her curls, I’m now living vicariously through its length.)

Tangled‘s Rapunzel is not just a girl with fabulous (magical) hair, though. She is surprisingly well-adjusted for someone who spends her entire life with just a chameleon as a friend. She likes to read and paint. She’s playful and creative.

And she’s brave. When a strange man enters her tower, she takes action and whacks him over the head with a frying pan. She takes the chance to follow her dream, and she stands up to Mother Gothel when she realises the truth about who she is.

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Part of what makes Rapunzel so appealing is that, although she’s not 100% content with her life, she doesn’t pin her hopes on a man to make her life better. Her dream of seeing the floating lanterns is what drives her and she does whatever she can to make it come true. Sure, she happens to fall in love along the way, but her romance doesn’t make her lose focus.

I don’t want my daughters to pin all their hopes and dreams on finding the right man. I want them to have adventures and chase their dreams, whether they’re single or not. I want them to be secure in who they are as Poppet and Pixie, to know that it’s not a soulmate who will complete them and make them happy.

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And when love comes along, I want them to be brave enough to embrace it.

What do you like about Rapunzel?

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Princess Lessons: Don’t Lose Your Voice

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My cousin and I used to be just a teeny bit obsessed with The Little Mermaid when we were kids. We rented it from the video shop just about every weekend, scripted our own play version of it – in which I was Ariel, she was Ursula, and my brother was Flotsam and Jetsam. We knew all the songs by heart and probably drove our parents crazy singing them all the time.

Hold on. This is all sounding very familiar. (Can anyone say Frozen?) Ahem.

The Little Mermaid still holds a very special place in my heart, and my daughters also see the magic in it. Poppet has, on occasion, lamented being born a “mortal and not a mermaid”. I’m pretty sure that Ariel had a lot to do with my desire for red hair, a desire that was cemented when I discovered The X-Files.

What lessons do I want my girls to take from this tale?

The first is quite obvious: listen to your father. If he forbids something, don’t do something stupid in a flash of temper. Give him time to mellow. Allow yourself time to cool down. Then, in a rational manner, present your case. You’ll (probably) wear him down eventually. Ariel could have saved a lot of trouble if she’d bypassed Ursula and worked harder on winding King Triton around her little finger.

(Dear reader, calm down. I’m not actually advocating that my girls manipulate their father to get their own way. Though that bit about everybody chillaxing – that I did mean.)

On a more serious note, there’s the matter of Ariel’s voice. She tries really hard to get Prince Eric to fall for her, but she has no voice. When Ursula shows up with the voice, Eric goes gaga. This isn’t about not speaking, because my girls are physically unable to stop talking. Trust me, we’ve tried.

I want them to know that their beliefs and opinions are part of what makes them so special, and they shouldn’t have to hide part of themselves to find a boyfriend. The world will tell them to play dumb, or to wear skimpy clothes, or to adopt another’s opinion, or to be someone they are not, all in order to catch a man.

But I want them to know that the right man won’t mute any of their qualities – the right man will help them blossom and grow and shine. I want them to know that who they are is enough even without a man.

(And also, there’s a whole host of fathers and uncles and grandfathers ready to break the kneecaps of any boy who tries to persuade them otherwise.)

What lessons do you get out of The Little Mermaid?

Princess Lessons: Stranger Danger

Poppet and Pixie love the Disney princesses. They never tire of watching the movies, “reading” the magazines, role-playing various scenes or singing their favourite songs. There is a lot of talk around the Internet whether it’s appropriate for Christians to let their children watch movies that include magic and witches; or if feminist moms’ little girls should be watching movies that convey patriarchal messages where the man is always the hero riding to the rescue; or if, in a world with an unhealthy idea of beauty, little girls should idolise the Disney version of what it means to be pretty.

Look, if you’re that worried, then you might as well throw out your TV, never venture out of your house, and keep your kids away from other children. I tried my best to keep Poppet in the dark about the existence of a certain annoying purple dinosaur, but as soon as she started school, she started singing the theme song and even told me she loved him. It was a dark day in our family.

Satan himself. {Image credit: ssb.wikia.com}

My point is this: yes, Disney’s princess movies are full of gender stereotypes and questionable elements, but they contain some important lessons too.

So, here is the first in my series of Princess Lessons:

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Snow White, the fairest of them all, doesn’t exactly conform to today’s standard of beauty. She’s curvy, and her curves tell my daughters that beauty does not equate to being skinny. She also shows my daughters that they don’t have to be blonde to be beautiful.

Snow White’s stepmother is insanely jealous of Snow White’s beauty, and tries to have her killed. My daughters see that beauty is not necessarily an advantage in life and that it can cause problems for a person: unwanted male attention; unfair assumptions about intelligence, personality, ambitions; and unfair expectations, to list a few.

Snow White is far too trusting. Not all of her choices are bad, though. The seven men she moves in with turn out to be good guys, but trusting an old woman almost gets Snow White killed. Poppet and Pixie are friendly little girls who greet everyone they see. I’m working on getting the “don’t talk to strangers” lesson across.

Snow White isn’t afraid of hard work. Once she moves in with the dwarfs, she cooks for them and keeps their house tidy. My girls need all the encouragement they can get when it comes to tidying their rooms. (Confession time: I am not the most diligent housewife, so perhaps I can stand to learn a thing or two from Snow White as well.)

What are your thoughts on Disney princesses?