Appearance & Posture - A03
The appearance of your teenage child may cause more family friction than any other single aspect of his life. It may of course be the scapegoat for deeper frustrations and dis-ease. Nevertheless if handled carefully, problems to do with how your child dresses or grows his hair are generally resolved in the fulness of time, and you are left wondering why the confrontations and rows ever took place. Meanwhile they do give your child a medium for exploring and expressing his style, without any chance that lasting harm will come of it.
Style matters very much. This is the body language your child uses to express his personality to others. The way people move and handle themselves says much more than words ever can and makes a powerful unconscious impression on others. You can help your child to understand that and develop his style even better — something he’ll value, and thank you for understanding. You cannot expect him to choose styles you like, because he is not a carbon copy of you. But you can respect his choice, at the same time offering him an important example — that he too can respect others without having to agree with them.
If his choice embarrasses you, carry it lightly and with gentle good humour: you probably embarrass him too and the less you hurt each other the better you will get on. Clothing and hair-do’s are the harmless ways of exploring identity through appearance. Frustrate these and your child may be tempted to mutilate himself with home-made tattoos and the like — much less desirable.
Even worse, he may use his body posture to express the way he feels frustrated and poorly used! A year or two of rounded shoulders and slack muscles can mark his skeleton for life. Bad posture can become a problem of body structure that borders on deformity and sets him up for backache (see backache) more surely than any injury. So tolerate the harmless things with a good grace, if only to prevent him being tempted to desperate alternatives that do permanent harm.
What to do
- Develop your child’s appreciation of style, right from the start. Openly admire comfortable styles wherever you see them, especially ones you would not choose for yourself. Teach that styles can be admired without being necessarily liked.
- Let young children dress up and colour their hair for an afternoon. To prevent this sort of fun at a young age might precipitate problems later.
- Even before school age help your child choose clothes to complement his character and temperament. By his teens he will already have outgrown the worst, and have some style of his own. If he still, at sixteen, wants to look like the rest of the gang, explore why he needs that kind of group identity (see friends with difficult teenagers & adolescence).
- If your teenage child wishes to dress in the eccentric fashion of the day, make him confine it to social occasions. Wearing fashionable clothes to school may cause disciplinary problems there which will only serve to harden the child’s resolve to wear them all the time. From then on there can be no special occasions; no dressing up.
- Outrageous appearance is often used as a defensive shield. If your child hides behind really long hair — constantly dragging it across his face and touching it — ignore the shield and go straight to the point. Confidence has been lost and you can help him regain it. Gentle praise and encouragement helps, criticism only confirms what he already feels.
- See that your child does not have too much money (see teenagers and money). If he has, he can waste an awful lot on badly made fashionable clothes.
- Take a positive line on body language, too. Easy movement is a positive communication, so help him learn it. Yoga, drama, dance, sport and martial arts are all immensely helpful in improving balance, poise and consequently posture (see after school).
- If a child moves and stands awkwardly, he is immediately at a disadvantage — (see job applications). Look for:-
- flat or deformed feet, either with or without painful knees and hips (see feet the feet will need corrective physical treatment if posture is ever to be easy, and footwear will always need to be carefully chosen.
- stoop, rounded shoulders, drooping neck. Early developers often get into this habit to conceal an embarrassment about their height; later they can learn to take pride in it, and use yoga or dance to correct the spinal distortion.
- if a posture suggests shyness, lack of confidence, anxiety or lack of self-respect, drama is an ideal hobby (after school).
There is no more point in nagging a child about his posture than about his appearance. Bad posture is a lost opportunity — though with an effort you can usually put it right. Explore style together in the first place and your teenager need never have anything to slouch about!