Episode 89: Defining Beauty for our Children & Ourselves with Abbie Sprünger
/The topic for this episode is a problem we all likely face, and with the mixed research coming out on the effect of social media on teens, it's particularly important. With the ever-changing beauty standards and the influx of social media, our perception and definition of beauty are heavily focused outward as opposed to inward. And no matter how well you meet society's standards of beauty, this can have a truly damaging effect on a person's self-concept and worth. I don't know about you, but I want my kids to know that their worth as a person is not in any way tied to their physical appearance or their performance, but rather to the simple fact of their humanity. How to get there is what we discuss in this episode.
To join me in this conversation, I’m so excited to bring with you Abbie Sprünger. She has authored multiple books for young adults and families, and works alongside her husband, Micah, as a caretaker of Wesley Gardens Retreat. She is a proud mother of three beautiful girls. As the survivor of eating disorders and exercise addictions, she drew from her personal journey of healing to positively impact new generations of girls everywhere.
Here is an overview of what we talked about:
New children’s book “What Is Beautiful?”
How to help our kids come to value their inner beauty
How to talk to children about comparing themselves with others
How our relationship with our mothers affects our understanding of beauty
If you wish to get a copy of her book “What Is Beautiful?”, you can purchase it HERE.
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and I'm so excited to have you with us today, because today we're going to be talking about beauty. Inner beauty, finding our inner beauty and helping our children find beauty within themselves. And I'm so excited to bring in our guest today. Her name is Abbie Sprünger and she's written a beautiful children's book and that helps us do just that.
And Abbie I'm so excited to welcome you to the show and I just have to say your book is so beautiful and such a gift to the adults who read it and to the children. So Abbie, welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are, what you do in the message that you're spreading in the world?
Abbie: Thanks for having me Laura. Yeah, I did release this children's book back in the fall so quite recently and yet I feel as though I've been on this beauty journey. What is Beautiful? Who is Abbie? Who is Abbie's Beauty? What is obvious beauty so forth? For a number of years. I started wrestling in my teens with eating disorders, exercise disorders. And so I'd love to unpack that just with you and your listeners, some in the show today.
Just how our moms affect our journeys with that and so forth. I can look back at these conversations which are now compiled tightly in a little children's book and they really span for a few decades really in terms of how I've been interacting with them and learning from them. So I was raised in Atlanta and headed out to grad school for a few years in California now have been in Savannah for the last bunch of years. Met my husband here, Micah, we run a retreat center called Wesley Gardens retreat in Savannah.
We have three little ones 5,6 and 8, the third of whom her name is Julia, she's adopted from India. We brought her home three years ago. And so that's thrown another slice just of uh I wouldn't say complexity, but maybe just added narrative to this conversation of beauty very often. I would say most the time when we're out in public, some comment is made, whether it's about picking out Aaliyah's beauty or just people staring at us and then our kids have a response of why are we stared at?
Or Aaliyah starting to even interact with her own questions of, you know, I know I'm part of this family, but do I really belong in this family? And what does it mean to belong in my beauty personally and in a family. So lots of just loaded questions that are tucked into this word beauty and beautiful that I have just, I think what this children's book released become increasingly fascinated by. So that's where the context of most of my days is really a homeschooling mom now with covid and just doing life as a mom with alongside so many of you and then I happened to release this book on beauty. So I look forward to just exploring it some today with you listeners.
Laura: Yeah, thank you for that. You know, I think our longest and most deepest and most important relationships that we have in our life is the relationship we have with ourselves and with our bodies and it's so heavily, especially for girls. It's so heavily informed by the mother's relationship with their own body.
And in the mother-daughter relationship, you know, I have so many memories growing up around the feedback I got from my mother about my appearance. You know, it's funny, so these stories, I think we've through the generations, my mom grew up as an older sister to a younger sister who was very kind of, you know, just kind of the cultural ideal of beauty, blonde hair, blue eyes. And you know, I think my mom grew up in a time where she, her intelligence was what was praised in her appearance.
You know, it wasn't either wasn't talked about or she was given negative feedback about her appearance. And so when she became a mom, she kind of overcompensated with her daughters. Lots of compliments to us, lots of just attempting in a beautiful way to build us up and give us, you know, the confidence and the feedback that she didn't get growing up and as a result of course, you know what our parents do with the best of intentions. My mom is a beautiful, wonderful mom.
Sometimes they have unintended consequences and so for me coming up and especially in my transition to being a mom, my sense of self and worth for a very long time was very rooted in my appearance. and then becoming a mom and having my appearance change so drastically left me feeling a bit untethered, You know, is this a common story that you hear from moms are that you share.
Abbie: Well, thank you for being so honest in that I love hearing snippets of that lower because yes, to the degree that I would almost say, let's see how could I say this? I think by observing and noticing aspects of your mom and the way that she not only was parented but affected by compensating under, over in her mothering of you.
Just all that work, which can be exhausting and take years and sometimes needs a therapist or just a group of friends. I mean it's intense work, but I think it's so crucial if we desire to be healthy moms ourselves. And so it's a common story for those of us who dug into our stories and into ourselves and our journeys with beauty because no parent is perfect, right? And so even the most well-intentioned, healthy, brilliant, whatever positive adjectives you want to fill in their they're still not perfect. And so they it's impossible for them to form us and shape us as perfect children, daughters.
And you know, I mean even that definition right there of what is a perfect daughter, even mean, would if we interviewed each other today, you know, all of us would have different answers and same with beauty. And so I think in that sense it's just it's absolutely crucial for us to explore and ask questions sometimes you have enough of a relationship with your mom where you can actually interact with these, but I think more times than not, it's work that you'll do on your own with close girlfriends or a therapist, but I can relate a lot with your story and it was interesting that your mom tended to overcompensate.
My mom tended to undercompensate and sort of took what she was raised with having brothers and just not a lot of physical affirmation and if there was any, it was more homely words like that and so sort of her parents saying we prefer to focus on your intellect or your, you know, so my mom just feeling at a core level that she wasn't a beautiful human and then I have one sister to I think sibling order and so many things play into this conversation, which is again why it's just crucial.
I don't say that word lightly, but to to explore, but just was raised with one other sister and it wasn't until late into our twenties that both my sister and I had been in counseling for eating disorders and just pretty wrecked on this conversation untethered. I love that word of just what the heck does this mean? And we want to know our beauty, but we have no framework for it from our upbringing. And so that opened a can of conversations between my sister and I and my mom and my mom really having to face a lot of her own work that she hadn't done and then her just sadly apologizing to us, you know, that that affected so much of her mothering, similar to what you shared.
So, you know, again, a lot of this is dependent upon, you know, your family dynamic and not everyone has a relationship or a mom who cares to do the work. But what we can all do ourselves is dig into our own stories. Like you reference Laura. And so if there was one encouragement or a bit of advice to women, you know, listening today to this conversation just to to be gracious with yourself, but to know that the work you're doing is not in vain and it can affect generations to come as you can hear just in our little dialogue of two people and how a mother's role impacts a generation.
Laura: Okay, so I keep coming back as I'm hearing you talk about. So okay, so how do we find a balance? How do we help our daughters know that we do think that they're beautiful, How do we help them find their own definition of beauty? Both inner and outer beauty? How do we balance kind of reducing focus on appearance without sending the message? That because we're not focusing on appearance, that kind of in our silence were saying something with our silence, you know, how do we balance it all?
Abbie: Okay, I love that question and interestingly, I don't think, Okay, so what we say or don't say is going to have a huge influence. But stepping back to that conversation we had before about our moms, I think even bigger than what they, I shouldn't say bigger, but more foundational is our perceptions of them growing up. And I think what we don't talk about a lot is that most of communication is body language, two-year-old, a three-year-old, a five-year-old. They are watching you when particularly daughters here.
I don't feel like I have a grasp on the boys side of things so much. Yet those penises and stuff kind of weird me out sometimes and I just don't want to do with that, but particularly talking about daughters here and and how our daughter's perceive us as moms, but I think they're imbibing so much more and that's the first language they learn before they can hear and understand the language of what a mom is saying to them in spoken language per se they're hearing and seeing their sensing communication via a mother's body language.
And so you know you just you think of a mirror and for me it's very natural for and I have a terrible memory but it's very natural for me to bring up memories of my mom looking in the mirror, getting ready for a date, jingling bracelets, putting on her perfume. Those memories are so clear and vivid to the smell and just watching her interact with her own body that is the first tool of influence that I think we have got to address even before we get to the how do we, when we open our mouths and our kids are say 4,5,6, 14, 15, 16 before that even there's this step of which goes back to what we addressed earlier of have I done my own work and not like in the past tense as I just said it, but have I done it? And am I doing it? Because it's an ongoing conversation mole beauty is not a finish line.
That's been such a surprising piece of this book release is that it changes just like pregnancy changes our bodies beauty shifts through the seasons. And so it's never something that we can check off in the box. It's an ongoing coming back to in various seasons of our mothering event or you know, teens, singleness, college years early marriage, but then through motherhood, I think it's something we've constantly got to be coming back to. That was a long answer, sort of the first part I think of your question and then.
Laura: I just want to pull something out to for our listeners. You know, this is what you are saying is not unlike all of the ways that we show up in our parenting here at the balance parent podcast that when we are looking to make changes in our parenting, the very first place we look as it is within so that those changes can be more authentic and taking a look at what are the overt things were saying, but also what are the behind the scenes, the read between the lines messages that our kids are getting, you know, these are what you're saying is the exact same thing that we talk about like that our kids are always watching if we want them to learn respect, well do that by modeling respect to them.
And so a big step then it seems like what you're saying is learning to kind of heal yourself a little bit kind of working to I understand how you relate to your body to your parents, how you define beauty for yourself and having a firmer sense of all of that for yourself allows you to show up in a better way for your kids. Yeah?
Abbie: Yeah, yeah, absolutely and healing is definitely, I think going to be a part of it for most of us going back to that none of us could be parented perfectly, but I think you know, depending where you are on that question of what is my beauty, what does it mean for me to be beautiful and you know, and maybe for some of you, you hear that and there's just a wall up and you can't even go there um just to say that's okay, you know that's where you are today, but I would encourage you to move into that because I Lauren I talked about this some earlier, I'm coming from a Christian perspective and so, you know, whatever words are helpful for you to fill in here to hear what I'm about to say, but you know, being made in God's image and believing that there's a stamp of beauty that starts at conception that can't be rooted out, it can be ignored or denied.
That I think that there something beautiful intrinsically about each and every one of us. It's not about shape or hair color or, you know, we can talk about those things later. I don't want to neglect those things and act like outer appearance doesn't matter. We all know better than that. And yeah, so that's not what I'm saying, but I am saying that I do believe and you don't have to believe me today and saying this, but I do believe that there's something beautiful within you and I personally, and Laura, you can share from your therapist perspective here, but I would say it's crucial to go on that journey yourself and discover the beauty within you.
If you hope to pass that on a bridge, a conversation with your daughter, because again, you know, you can tell your daughter until she's blue in the face, You're beautiful, you're beautiful, You're beautiful if she knows you don't think that about yourself or not even think it, but no, it in your core if she knows that that's a disconnect that is going to be hit upon at some age or another, it's going to leak out and this is not to say that you've been a bad parent to this point or you can't be a healthy mom if you don't know your beauty, but the honest interaction, not only with yourself, but given your daughter's age interacting with her about it, you know, just when you look in the mirror, you don't need to lie and say, you know, like wow, I'm looking super hot today.
If you feel from P and P. M. Sing, I'm not saying like lie or fake it, but start to think about your language and how your daughter is looking at you and you can say out loud to her, wow, I'm really struggling with my beauty today. But deep down, somewhere in here, I know there's beauty in me and so I'm going to do this or that to rediscover it today or work through it. So I think that's an important part of it is at an appropriate age to start to let your daughter in to your journey with beauty again, helping her to see, wow, mom doesn't have it all together and being a healthy parent or human is not about having it all together and knowing you're hot stuff all the time, but it's about a healthy relationship with yourself and your body and we're wobbly were wobbly human beings right?
And that I think if I had heard my mom talk about that, I think it would have freed me up more as a daughter as a growing human being on my wobbly days, you know of deep down I know this is true about me but wow, I'm just not feeling it today and then you can work on tools of what do I do then you know, take a walk journal, call a friend so forth. But if you don't have that core and the knowledge of knowing your beauty is there in the first place, then it's a bit of a pointless conversation.
Laura: I love what you're saying. I want to pull out a few things to that beauty is inherent just like worth is I feel like as I was listening to you, I just kept the word worthiness just kept coming up and so often we hang our worthiness or beauty on external definitions and external feedback and one of the biggest messages for me in the work I do with parents is starting to find that your worthiness, your beauty is all inherent that you were born with it, just like your kids were born with it and nothing you do impacts it in any way right?
The other thing that was coming up as I was, you know, as you were talking, I was picturing a mother and child interacting and this is one thing that I think that children can absolutely teach us so much and guide us so much because if if you are around little kids, boys and girls, they are so open to seeing the beauty in everything. They're so open to it. They're so good at finding beauty everywhere, everywhere.
My kids go to a Waldorf school and a big principle in Waldorf early childhood pedagogy is that the environments be beautiful because children need beauty as a part of kind of awakening the soul. My kids invite me to see beauty everywhere all the time and in my own body too. So you know, there's this beautiful like thing where sometimes in the process of unlearning all the messages that the world has taught us, our kids can be incredible guides in that unlearning process because they haven't learned that they shouldn't yet. You know.
Abbie: I think you're so right. They don't have a value scale for it. I think that's a mistake that we make sometimes of saying kids are color blind, They don't notice differences. They love everyone. And you know, that's not true at all right. And I understand the sentiment there, but I think they are just like you said, they're so perceptive about color and difference and you know, noticing this or but they don't have the value scale to it yet, which is a reference and so I think you're so right that they can be incredible teachers for us.
You know, I was plucking some gray hairs the other day and my eight-year-old was like mommy, what are you doing? You know, I'm like blushing a little bit, you know, just like, I didn't want her to see me doing this, but here we are. So telling her, you know, I'm just plucking gray hairs and she's like, why gray so cool. You know, I'm like, okay, you know, different perceptions.
Laura: you know, I just, I have stories I want to share to that I have this great streak that's starting to come in here and I love it. I'm very excited to go gray. But my daughter who's also ate, I noticed it the other day and she goes, oh mom, you've got some silver hair there and my other daughter who's five came up and she goes, oh, your hair looks like honest when she gets that streak, you know from frozen and they were just, they were just marveling and I'm like, yeah, I know, Isn't it beautiful? I love it. You know, and we just.
Abbie: and remind me too. I mean we could just go on and on here, but just no matter how we feel about ourselves, our daughter's view us as ana like they think we are the most princess and we're setting their idea of beauty and princess. And so yeah, there's so much, even in that story, I'm so glad.
Laura: I have so many of these, so like, you know, we always talk about how in our house, my belly is the best drum belly, like when we do go, my belly, like everybody comes and drums on my belly, you know, it's so much fun and hard, like hard to like let my kids lead, body love in that way, you know, because there's still layers that are, you can hear me listeners getting teary read here, there's still layers there there are and there always will be, this is just like balance. This is something that has never done, it's something that we're doing as a process.
Abbie: Thank you for not apologizing. You know?.
Laura: No, no, no, not at all.
Abbie: You laugh in one sentence and cry in the other and it's just, I think that's such a picture of beauty because you're right, it is layered and it it ships on days and seasons and hormones and that's okay.
Laura: Absolutely, it's okay. So just one other little wisdom from an eight-year-old a few days ago, I was I was working out and I was doing this workout video that I didn't want my kids to see because in it there is body shaming in it from the instructor and I like the moves in it.
I like the way it makes me feel, but I really did not want my daughter's hearing that message, you know about the bodies, you know, and so they wanted to come and hang out with me while I was working out and I was not going to let them do it and I told them why and my eight year old says mommy then you shouldn't be listening to that message and you shouldn't be giving that person your money, they're hurting you, you know, wow, she's so wise.
Abbie: Yeah, just so perceptive with this stuff almost like a no-brainer that when you hear.
Laura: Like if I don't want to subject you to that painful message, like why am I subjecting myself to it? I mean and of course, I am good with my boundaries, like of what I let in, you know, because again, and that comes from a healing place where I'm actively working on that boundary. So I mean like I totally was like, yeah, you know what you're right, I'm going to go back to this person who I also love to work out with who is beautifully body compassionate and loving and.
Abbie: Well I feel something that you mentioned a few minutes ago two is so crucial in this and it reminds me of a previous question to that I got off topic on, but when you were asking about you know, what do you say to girls daughters or you know, maybe some of you are single or just mentor girls that it's not necessarily a biological daughter, but younger girls in your life, how do we affirm them without overly thinking and I think you know the worst conversation is massive there. And so, and I think for me when I'm thinking about how to affirm a hair styler, you look really cute today. I think we overuse the word beautiful and you'll hear this if you start listening to girlfriends talking to each other a lot of times, you know, when you just go into a group which again, Covid has made this a little different, but picture your imaginations how it once was in life when you go into a gathering and a friend just says, oh, you look so beautiful, but versus not that that's wrong.
There's nothing wrong per se with it. But what if we started to elaborate on that and say you look really rested today, or it just seems like your your heart is well today or something's different about you versus always clumping it into this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. So I think that could be of help even with our daughters is starting to reflect things to them, even about their appearance, but just using a broader language than always beauty.
So if you mean that they they've gotten a lot taller and they're looking so you know, whatever, but just I think just expanding our vocabulary so that we don't avoid acknowledging and affirming external beauties. You know, humans are beautiful people and we're unique in our design and that's not to be ignored. We weren't created, we were created equally and value and worth, but not in how we look.
And so I think we just need to get a bit more creative with how we affirm one another and our daughters and just not let beautiful be such a like save that for really, you know, there's certainly times for it. You look absolutely beautiful today but save that, you know, for really special times when you mean it with everything in you. So that because I just feel like it's it's gotten a bit trampled on so much so that we don't even know necessarily what it means anymore.
Laura: Absolutely. And I think there's something to to be said for being specific for inviting self-reflection to if we are going to be praising or reflecting on kind of what we, what we're seeing, reflecting on effort or creativity, some other piece of it like oh wow, you chose these clothes and they go so well together. That color palette really suits you. You know I mean? Or like gosh, I would never have thought to put that together.
You know, my daughter loves to play with my oldest likes to play with makeup and she always puts this like shimmery shadow down her like you know, like wear her like her under-eye areas and she's like she does it on purpose because she thinks she looks like a butterfly when she does that, you know, and like I just like, oh I see you've got your butterfly eye shadow on today. You know like it's just, you know, I mean, I think you're so right.
The praise is much more effective when it's specific and it wouldn't it's focused on their efforts and on the aspects of themselves that are also beautiful. Like their creativity is also beautiful. Their curiosity, their curiosity, they're playing like those are also beautiful and so kind of even diversifying our definition and of what like being thoughtful of how we use the word beautiful but also like diversifying when and where we use it to describe what you know.
Abbie: And with that you know and it goes with the self-work on this too. But asking ourselves what about this daughter is uniquely beautiful to me and reflecting that to her you know and then the harder maybe more vulnerable question of what what is uniquely beautiful about me and if you want to share that with a spouse or a friend or just with a journal. You know? Again we're not trying to push you off a bridge here to these hard conversations because they are hard work but they're just so worth it.
Laura: They are they are still worth it. You I mean again kind of like just as we wrap up coming back to that sense of like the relationship you have with yourself Is the one constant in your life. It's so important to work on it.
Abbie: Yeah. Well and that's the front of the children's book is called What is Beautiful and that's when I wrote that that word down on a sheet of paper, the semantic spell out bu to the full be you ful, you know? And so it's like, wow, how have we missed this? But so much of beauty is simply learning to be ourselves to the full and that's a funny thought.
Laura: Yeah, thank you so much. Happy for sharing that and sharing your thoughts on beauty and how we can support ourselves to redefine and claim our beauty and also help our kids find that too for themselves. Thank you so much.
Abbie: Yeah, thank you.
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All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this.