I was driving Ruby, who is 7, to school on her own yesterday and she asked me out of the blue, “Do I look pretty?”

And there it was. That thing that comes up for girls from the time they are toddlers. The thing that, as a mother, I want to oppose from the ground up. “Do I look pretty?”

From the time girls are born and they grow, people remark on their looks. “You are SO CUTE! You are pretty!” They mean it as a kindness, a way of connecting. Boys get that kind of commentary less often once they are out of baby and toddler-land and as they grow, it drops off precipitously. The comments that Noah gets about being cute at age 8 I can count on one hand. He does get “handsome” but what he receives most often is, “Look at you, you are getting so BIG! You are tall! You are a strong guy!”

Very different messages.

When Ruby was 4, she still had a delightful little kid belly that I adored. She had not yet moved into her “girl” look she has now. For me, it represented holding onto a tiny bit of her toddlerhood. One day she asked me, “Am I fat, Momma? My tummy looks fat.” My heart cracked as I told her she was beautiful and would always be beautiful, just as she was. That “fat” was a word we didn’t use because it usually was meant to be mean. That a person’s size was never how we judged them.

She was 4.