My 10-Year-Old Is Scared She'll Be Bullied If She Doesn't Wear Makeup to School

A mother in Melbourne, Australia, wrote to Kidspot, talking about a dilemma she’s facing with her 10-year-old daughter. This mother wrote that when she was her daughter’s age, she was concerned about playing outside, climbing trees, and riding her bike.

But her daughter Ava is nothing like that. Instead, Ava loves fashion, skin care, and makeup. The mom wrote that she’s totally fine with her daughter’s interests … except for the makeup.

More from CafeMom: Mom Has Started Making 11-Year-Old Wear Makeup Every Day & Dad Is Concerned

While she believes the fashion and skin care are true points of interest for Ava, she thinks the makeup might have more to do with peer pressure than an actual curiosity. In fact, the mom believes Ava’s peers and friends are creating this pressure. The girls in Ava’s school — in fifth and sixth grade — range from ages 10 to 12, and they’re experimenting with makeup.

More than just playing in their mothers’ stashes and applying certain products on weekends, these girls are wearing it to school, including foundation, mascara, and lip gloss.

The mom thinks all of this is way over the top and unnecessary. Recently, when Ava asked her mother for makeup for her birthday so she could wear it to school, she said no.

“I said she was too young and that makeup at school isn’t needed, not even in high school,” she explained. As she said this, Ava started bawling. She told her mom, “All my friends wear it and so do all the girls. I don’t want to be the only one who isn’t, they will make fun of me.”

Afterward, the mother and daughter had a serious talk. Ava explained how big of a deal makeup really is. Later, the mom started to make some observations of her own.

“While mostly the makeup was pretty natural, there were the odd faces that clearly had eyeshadow or tinted lip gloss, or just really poorly matched foundation or badly applied mascara that stood out quite a lot,” she wrote.

The mom was taken aback. The thought that these children feel they need to wear makeup to school to fit in, even reapplying it through the day, made her sad.

“As a parent though, it is. I just want Ava to be able to be a kid,” the mom wrote. “I want her to be carefree and not concerned so much with what she looks like, how others see her and the idea she needs to change herself to fit in, which is essentially what her desire to wear makeup is.”

She said Ava is still asking and becoming increasingly more upset when her mother refuses. She doesn’t know how much longer she can keep this up when it impacts her so much. The mom knows that she’ll eventually have to give in, even though she doesn’t want to.