My daughter is quite attractive and has been since she was small - obviously under a sliding scale of values.
I don’t recall speaking of how pretty she was other than when someone else mentioned it, and then just “We think so too.”
On the other hand, I do have a shirt that says “Guns don’t kill people. Fathers with pretty daughters do.” :dubious:
And when a boy wanted to take her to dinner I warned him jokingly that I had access to power equipment and a good working knowledge of the National Forest trail system.
I’m not sure what I think. My daughter is three weeks old. I told my wife that she (our daughter) is a little fox (she’s a non-native speaker [my wife, not my daughter]). She (wife) also overhears me telling her (daughter) how pretty/cute she is all the time. Given that she’s three weeks old, I have no reason to tell her how clever she is, yet. Time will tell.
We’ve agreed not to assign gender roles, will push hard for STEM (we both are STEM, and my wife has higher education that I have). But for now, all I can say is she’s a fox. She’ll be a heartbreaker. Unless she’s as dumb as a rock, but given who we are, I don’t have reason to believe that she will be. I can say without a doubt that there’s nothing at all sexual in anything that I say about a pure, innocent, unsullied soul, so I would give the dude with the four year old some credit.
Now I’m going to be self-conscious about the word fox, and interestingly, I would never use it in Spanish where it is strictly sexual, and not the good kind of sexual.
If you keep telling your kids that they’re valuable for traits they have no control over, they’re going to grow up feeling as if life is beyond their control.
You’re pretty! You’re smart! You’re gifted! That’s like praising them for being tall.
Instead tell your kids that they’re brave, or hard-working, or kind. Something they have control over.
1 = Teaches daughter that her worth is based upon her looks
That was vaguer than what you just said. How is it ‘taught that worth is based on looks’? By rarely mentioning anything else, fairly often giving compliments about looks, ever? And it’s not necessarily ‘sexual’ in everyday terms to compliment looks.
And while I wondered before how the dad mentioning the girls’ looks (it seems, using cringeworthy phrasing) to somebody else ‘teaches (the kid) that worth is based on looks’ I’m really wondering how we know now more specifically that the girl can’t count on this dad giving all kinds of other compliments. For all we know he may compliment the girl about everything, too much (not uncommon for parents to do now, IMO).
Still seems to me like maybe the ‘scale’ contains some general social commentary about parenting that isn’t really to do with sexual abuse, but implying a connection between opposing sensibilities and sexual abuse seems like a good way to promote one’s own view.
Anyway the bottom line remains that butting out of other people’s parenting is the right choice the overwhelming % of the time, especially in a time of not only cultural diversity (in terms of foreign born population) but fracture of the original base culture, speaking of US circumstances. Unless it’s something indicative of a crime, not something you don’t agree with.
I came to the Dope in full disclosure asking if the problem was in my ability to gauge whether I was being overly sensitive to the use of the term. Forgive me for seeking balance in what could well be a personal bias. I am hardly a pervert. But I also wasn’t raised with a full understanding of how a good father behaves.
I can’t remember the last time I heard fox or foxy used sexually, but it occurs to me that of course he’s going to be defensive when you tell him he said something inappropriate about his daughter.
You heard a father describe his infant daughter as a fox.
Possible matches for this word:
a hottie
a cute orange sly animal
a smart, sly person
You immediately went for the first option, and confronted the poor man about it.
Think of it as a form of Rorschach blot test.
There are many possible interpretations for what you heard.
That the FIRST and ONLY thought through your mind was underage sexuality, is somewhat disconcerting to me.
If I describe my son as a little devil, are you going to summon an exorcist?
She’s already explained that her view of that situation was colored by 1) her own experience in being abused as a child, and 2) the fact that she personally has only encountered the term used in a sexual context.
I’ve posted earlier that I think she should butt out of this situation. But the implication that she’s outed herself as a pervert has no valid basis and is completely inappropriate, IMO.
I came of age when calling a young woman a “fox” was a compliment about her sexual attractiveness, so depending on what I knew of this guy and his tone of voice, I can see how saying that today about his four-year-old daughter would be kind of skeevy. It wouldn’t make me reach for the phone to call Children Services, though.
I wouldn’t have found the example in the OP creepy, unless the father was making repeated comments hyping the child’s supposed sexiness, expressing interest in entering her in beauty pageants etc.
Would a random comment about what a cute little girl he thought she was have garnered similar attention?
What I do find squidgy is a current TV ad in which a father is in a bathroom with his adolescent daughter, demonstrating to her how one shaves one’s legs. :dubious:
There are good and bad aspects to heightened awareness about sexual abuse of children. Unnecessarily hyper-vigilant attitudes can be damaging, or just annoying.
I have a 2018 calendar posted in my office, a freebie from the local newspaper. The February photo was of a young girl in a ballet costume, with the lower half of a similarly attired adult (presumably her mother) in the background. I decided against displaying that particular month on the chance that someone might have found it inappropriate. Not a big loss, I suppose.
You do realize that this logic implicates you the same way, right? You are making the same exact inferences about the OP. There are plenty of other reasons why the OP might think this is what it means, but you have jumped straight to the one that implies they are a child molester.
What’s more, you have even less justification. The OP flat out told you the reason they thought about it that way: because they were sexually abused by their own parents. Obviously someone like the OP who has been sexually abused is going to be more aware of the possibility than the average person. Furthermore, if they were a child molester, then they are the least likely to think there was something was up. Child molesters tend to be in denial, and treat sexualization of minors as normal.
There is actually at least a possibility that the OP’s friend was meaning it in a sexual way. There is essentially no possibility that the OP was even thinking something untoward towards this little girl.
Look, I don’t think the guy in the OP is a pedo or anything, but can we agree that calling a kid cute is not comparable to calling her “hot”, “foxy”, or any other term laden with sexual overtones?
The answer to your question is no and with good reason. Parents are supposed to find their kids cute and adorable; it probably brings out nurturing behavior. Parents aren’t supposed be to lusting after their kids. There’s a line.
That said, I can’t relate to even going around telling people my kids are cute. Even if i believed it true (and it is…my daughter is damn adorable), if I’m going to brag, its going to be about something that doesn’t kinda sorta flatter me and my awesome genetics.
It’s also kind of poor form to be in the habit of singling out one daughter for her looks, but maybe that’s just me.
Several people have noted the rather dated quality of the term “fox”. I think for myself I experienced it as a way of sort of “stepping to the side” of the phenomenon of finding his daughter sexually attractive, which may be why it didn’t set of worry-bells for me so much.
Consider these other formulations also using antiquated terms that you wouldn’t expect someone to use seriously to indicate someone is sexy to them nowadays :
“She’s going to be such a femme fatale”
“I’m telling you, he’s got this lothario stuff down”
I suppose if you are a person who thinks it is inherently creepy to think of your child as a person who possesses a sexuality, that’s not going to make it a lot better, but it really doesn’t reek of prurient sexual interest in his own kid.
My mother said her biggest regret in parenting was not telling her daughters that they were beautiful or pretty. She didn’t want to raise vain girls. She didn’t want us to pin our value on our looks (she has three above average looking daughters, my baby sister in particular was stunning at about 24 - she’s still a good looking woman at 45). The issue she was left with was three girls with low confidence about one of the tools women use to get ahead in life - their looks. Maybe that isn’t the way it should be, but that is the way it is. Because it took us well into adulthood to believe that we were good looking, we let other people - in high school, boyfriends as young adults - get away with knocking us down. On the other hand, she always told us we were smart and kind - and she got girls who believed they were smart and kind.
Don’t raise vain daughters, or girls who believe their only value is in their physical attractiveness, but don’t raise daughters who don’t have self confidence about something that is so basic to how we present ourselves to others. That opens them to abuses and self doubt - and it handicaps them when projecting confidence.
Its fine to tell girls they are pretty. Just also tell them that they are smart, kind, hard working, etc.
…Look kid, you’re funny looking, blunt as a box of hammers, and have nothing that anyone would ever want. But you aren’t afraid of spiders. Now out into the world with you!..
Praise is a funny thing. My mom always made sure to tell me I looked “so handsome” in family portraits. My dad called me “ladykiller” and “studman”. For anyone to make the leap to assuming that either of them were somehow lustful of me is absurd. Nor did it give me some false sense of self worth that later crushed me when I couldn’t compare to Brad Pitt good looks.
