During the holidays, more and more little girls wear two-piece swimsuits. Is this a good or a bad idea? A question that two moms answered.
At the beach, in the swimming pool, you will surely have noticed that more and more little girls are wearing a bikini. According to gender anthropology researcher and author Catherine Monnot-Berranger, wearing a bikini when you’re under 10 is almost unavoidable. “The two-piece for little girls has entered into mores“she observes for BFM TV. It’s true, in the aisles of stores specializing in children’s fashion, we find the bikini in the foreground. “Cute”, with pretty colors and a triangle top… Two-pieces for little girls are in fashion. A clothing choice that is not unanimous.
“She wants to be like mom”, argue some when asked what they think of girls’ bikinis. “She has time to grow“, retort the others, shocked to see a child dressed as an adult. “In the 1980s, a large number of women and little girls were shirtless at the beach and it was no problem for anyone. Today, it is almost unthinkable“, details Catherine Monnot-Berranger. But then who is right, who is wrong? Why do mothers take a dim view of girls’ bikinis when others claim them? Two mothers answered us.
“She has her whole life to wear a two-piece”
Faced with this persistent debate on the Web and around the coffee machine, we asked two moms kindly give us their opinion on the bikini for granddaughter. Bérengère, a lawyer, mother of two little girls: Léa six and a half years old and Solène aged 20 months, saw the arrival of bikinis for children with a strange eye. “I think she has her whole life to wear a two-piece and that the later it starts, the better“, she explains to us. This vision on the bikini comes straight from her upbringing, “I’ve always had very simple panties and my mother didn’t want me to wear a two-piece“, recalls Bérengère.
“For the first time Léa asked me to put varnish on my feet this summer and there if she asks me for varnish, earrings and she wants to have a bikini in fact it’s no“, responds emphatically the mother. “If we had to draw a parallel, when we look at the mini Misses in the United States, they are more in bikinis than in one-piece swimsuits and me I don’t want my daughter to look like this, to have this image“, concludes Bérengère.
The bikini sexualizes the body of little girls?
While the young woman evokes the mini Misses, others speak of the sexualization of the child’s body. This is the case of Elsa Labouret, from the Osez le féminisme collective: “By hiding, we sexualize. From an early age, little girls are thus locked into a logic of aestheticization and sexualization of their bodies.“, she says on BFM TV. A point of view that Bérangère does not share: “I’m not ready to say that the bikini sexualizes my daughter’s body. I’m not one to think of men sexualizing my child on the beach“, she tempers.
Here, however, eroticization seems to be in order, according to Catherine Monnot-Berranger: “Little girls are taught to hide their breasts, even if they don’t have any yet“. We explain to the girls to “hide part of their body from the world’s gaze (…) And pushes them to build themselves through this eroticizing social gaze placed on them. It is a form of pressure that does not encourage them to develop but to please and submit to this gaze.“, persists the anthropologist.
“She wants to do like mom”
Aby, 27, and her 3-year-old daughter Swann are far from these concerns. This manager at a software publisher doesn’t mind her daughter wearing a bikini, especially since it was the dad who bought the girl’s first two-piece: “The idea didn’t come from me, one day they came home from shopping and Swann’s dad had bought a bikini. At first I was a little reluctant and then later I saw that she was very comfortable. She is a very flirtatious little girl who wants to ‘do like mom’“.
That’s why this summer, Swann is going to swap his swimming trunks for a child model bikini. “It was natural and spontaneous, it’s pretty. It’s really not to hide my daughter’s body“. For Aby, “it is the gaze of the other that sexualizes” and not what we wear. She explains: “it’s like when a woman dresses in a mini skirt and is judged. We have the right to dress as we want, the same for little girls“. A vision that the young mother tempers all the same, especially when it comes to putting crop tops on her daughter.
The bikini, a physical diktat for little girls?
Aby also explains that it was little Swann, just three years old, who asked to wear a two-piece for the summer. Although in her case she is not precocious, it may happen that some girls go through precocious puberty and therefore wish to have support with the bikini top. However, given its feminine character which emphasizes the chest and flat stomach, doesn’t letting a little girl wear this swimsuit suggest that this is the physical goal to be achieved?
A little girl who can’t wear a bikini on the beach won’t she complex about her physique? The one who goes to heckle in the water shouldn’t she always remain vigilant that a piece of her torso, unformed, does not escape from her bikini? When women claim the desexualization of their breastsinstilling in future generations that they must be hidden isn’t that counter-productive?
There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to putting a bikini on your child. Parents and child are jointly responsible for these choices. Education is everyone’s businessyou just have to raise your child in confidence, self-esteem and far from certain dictates of society that stick to the skin and the image of the bikini.