My 13 yo stopped being my little girl about 2 years back after the monthly mood swings became intolerable. About a year ago was probably the last time she will ever curl up next to me on the couch to watch a movie. To her older brothers she was emphatically not “little” about 5 years ago even if she was small for her age and about half their size. I coached her sports teams and about 3-4 years ago I no longer considered most of the girls little. When they were about 9-10ish.
How did she refer to herself? As a girl or a little girl?
She was would say “I’m still little.”
A couple of beanie babies - ok. Having 2-3 big stuffed animals that you cuddle with at night and still call by name - childish.
My 12 yo daughter is not only a little girl, she’s daddy’s little girl and she’s going to remain that way until I die (it’s stipulated in my will as a requirement to inherit my valuable beer can collection). She’s not “little” in the diminutive sense (she could play linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles), so piggy back rides are out of the question.
She called me “daddy” up till recently, but I’ve been demoted to “dad.” That disappoints me, but it’s my burden to bear.
Even though she’s still a little girl, she’s far from immature. She’s long past dolls and make believe and Justin Bieber (thank god), but she still and always will love animals—mostly the good animals with fur and happy faces. She has a little yappy dog and an ancient gerbil who we should have named Methuselah (I swear his brother died about 8 years ago of very old age, but Archie just keeps plugging along…unless it’s cavity maggots that just make it appear he’s still alive and moving).
But, her favorite pet is Snickers, the guinea pig. He’s the most spoiled pig on Earth. My daughter carries him everywhere she goes except to school (not that she hasn’t tried). She even bicycles him to the park most days in her bike basket (“he needs the fresh air, dad”). She’s always trying to get me to bond with the pig, handing him off to me when she goes to the bathroom, and that is invariably always when *Snickers *decides to take a long, warm pee, right on my lap. Personally, I like to treat that guinea pig like they do in Peru—to an open flame, sprinkled with spices.
My 14 year old daughter stopped being a little girl…oh, about 14 years ago—she came out swinging and with an attitude. She calls me dad, but usually sarcastically (e.g. “yeah, sure daaaaaad, I’ll do my chores when I get home"). She’s so slight (waistline the size of a mud dauber) that I could probably piggy back 5 of her, but she would never submit to such a display of silliness.
She likes animals, but only the cold, scaly ones with ugly faces. That’s why she has no pets. If I let her get that tarantula she wants so badly, I have no doubt it would end up one morning on my pillow and she’d be orphaned following daaads massive heart attack.
My little girls are 23, 14, 5, and 3 - unless you ask the 3-year-old, because she’ll tell you that she’s a big girl, dangit, and quit trying to treat her like a baby! The 23-year-old would happily curl up next to me and watch a movie, and probably so would the 14-year-old. The preschoolers are so busy trying to be big and imitate their sisters and brothers that they somehow bypassed toddlerhood and went straight to tween. In my eyes, they’re all my babies, just like their gigantic brothers (ages 24 and 17.)
I guess, though, if we’re talking about other people’s little girls, I’d say around nine-ish - when they trade in the dollhouse and jump rope for crushes on odious teen celebrities and they start asking for training bras and lip gloss. But I’d never discourage a child I knew well from acting like a little kid around me, and I wouldn’t discourage my own child from maintaining a childlike relationship with an avuncular friend of mine. It’s okay for a kid to be 4 going on 14 going on 42 - normal, even.
I’m not so sure – what about the guy in MAS*H who (if my memory serves me correctly) took his teddy-bear to Korea with him, and it shared his bed with him every night – and he still did his job quite satisfactorily?
At 10.
Around the Basque Country we have a word, chiqui, short for chiquito, “little one”. It applies to any child under 10, and it’s the default nickname for anybody who is the youngest child in his family - if the youngest cousin, the nick is pretty much unavoidable. If you address a child who does not meet that criteria as chiqui, the “HEY! I’m TEN!” is absolutely indignant (remembering a recent one: the mother “… and three days :p” “doesn’t matter! :mad:”).
That’s got nothing to do with whether one can ride piggyback, though. Being able to ride piggyback is nowhere in the criteria.
The entire purpose of showing him with his teddy bear was to show he was still a child. Radar was treated like he was still a kid in many other ways, too.
On my 40th birthday I had to call our corporate office with a question about a Material Data Sheet. The guy who answered was heard telling someone else that "a little girl from memphis is looking for an MDS) when he came back to the phone I was laughing at him and telling him “Thank You!” for saying I sounded young on 40th birthday.
My youngest daughter turns 20 this year and lives a couple thousand miles away with her boyfriend. I’m not ready to answer.
She did go through a period from about 7 or 8 to just after high school graduation where she loathed it so I kept it to myself. She misses it now.
Getting rather off-topic, with this thread being about little girls (though this is the 21st century) – children can be, at times, fairly effective soldiers. Looking back at World War I, in the first half of which the UK relied on voluntary enlistment in the armed forces: in that period, very many males under the strict eligible age for recruitment, volunteered; and rules were bent, and they were let in – to the extent that at extremes, thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds were fighting in the trenches on the Western Front. They were often not a lot of use, except as cannon-fodder; but it happened, and was allowed to, as “filling a gap”.
Notionally, the rule was that no soldier under the age of nineteen was to serve at the battlefront; but the gung-ho teenagers often flouted that rule, and their superiors turned a blind eye. There’s the tale of a British Army very high-up, inspecting a draft of soldiers about to set off for France in 1915. He stopped and spoke to a sixteen-year-old member of the unit: “How old are you, boy?” “I’m nineteen, sir”, the lad replied. The great man responded, “If you’re nineteen, I’m the Queen of Siam. Never mind, we’ve got bigger things to worry about – carry on.” It would be nice to imagine his adding, “and if you want to take your teddy bear with you, that’s fine by me”.
That was a tv show. I’m talking about actual 18-21 year old young women who still acted very immature and childlike.
If she is telling you she is no longer a little girl, it’s probably good to respect that. BUT by all means continue carrying her around! The time will come soon enough when no one will carry her around. And people who are sexualizing perfectly innocent behavior can just go back to the Stone Age and grunt with their fellow cavemen.
Radar went home partway through the show because his uncle (the family breadwinner, as his father was dead) had passed away. In the last scene, the rest of the characters discover that he’d left his teddy bear on his cot, symbolizing the fact that he’d grown up.
I’ll join those who say context matters. For females in your life I would say around 10; definitely by 16. However for those in my life I reserve the right to think of them as little girls until they hit 87 and I’ve been dust for at least 10 years. And God have mercy on the person who hurts one of my little girls because He knows I won’t.
Sorry, all – I was getting carried-away and off-topic. Please, back to youthful females in normal life !