Zoey and the Princess Phase

My Snow White

Aurora from Sleeping Beauty is Zoey’s favorite Disney Princess. I asked her what she likes about this Princess that she so adores.  She said she likes her hair, her pink dress and her face.  She wants to have long hair like Aurora and Rapunzel and while she covets their long blonde locks, she has yet to say she wants to be beautiful like them.  I hope this is because we’ve done our job and she already knows she is.

I know every young girl isn’t drawn to Princesses, I wasn’t.  They also weren’t as prevalent when I was growing up.  I remember liking Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears and Cabbage Patch dolls.  I vaguely remember my sisters Brittany and Brooke having a thing for Ariel from Little Mermaid, but I would’ve been beyond the Princess loving age at that point.  In the stores now, it’s a Princess explosion, you can’t walk down a toy aisle at Target or Toys R Us without being bombarded by Disney Princesses.

I can’t recall the exact point that Zoey’s love of Princesses began, it was sort of a slow progression.  She was two almost three years old, when Joe wanted to start showing her Disney movies.  We started with the classic Mickey Mouse cartoons, which she loved.  Then we moved on to Snow White (it was Joe’s DVD), she was scared and didn’t like it at first as it contains some dark scenes that I had forgotten about.  It’s both strange and enlightening to watch these movies through a child’s eyes.  We have Netflix and Joe began adding Disney movies to our queue.  She was so excited to see the red envelopes come in the mail.  We rented movies from Alice in Wonderland to Beauty and the Beast to Dumbo to Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty.  She fell in love with Aurora and the fairies from Sleeping Beauty and most definitely preferred the Princess movies over the others.  When Princess and the Frog and Tangled were on Netflix streaming she became obsessed with those.  She has now seen every Disney Princess movie out there.  She knows all the Princesses by name, owns several Princess toys and dolls and when given a choice will chose the Princess theme every time.  When we let her pick out a poster to hang in her room and a bike for her birthday, of course, she went the way of the Princess.

At Disneyland Zoey meets Belle

I’m okay with this Princess phase even if the feminist inside me cringes sometimes.  The Princesses are too perfect to be true, but they aren’t real.  While I think many of us would welcome movies in which Princesses have realistic shapes and don’t get married at the end, for now this isn’t the case.  At least the Princesses don’t stand around talking about being pretty and calling attention to their looks.  It’s the jealous ones like Snow White’s stepmother and Cinderella’s stepsisters that call attention to it.  Besides, I think any ideas Zoey will get from the media about how a female “should” look will come later and not from cartoons.  My body image issues were derived more from the people around me and what they said, over what I saw in the media.  I believe it will be the same for Zoey and I try my best to be cognizant of what I say around her.  I try to avoid the word fat regarding myself or any one else.  We will teach her that we all have different hair, skin and body types and that is what makes us interesting.  We are all perfect in our own way.

This Princess phase will end in a few years and her next obsession will begin.  She’ll get into music and movies with real people in them.  She’ll get crushes on boys in bands and actors in movies and TV shows.  This will date me, but my poster walls were covered with New Kids on the Block posters.  My movie and TV crushes were Tom Cruise, Michael J. Fox and Kirk Cameron.  Yet for now, for Zoey, there’s no turning back, she’s deep into the Princess phase and no matter what we do, it’s here to stay for a while. As long as she doesn’t grow up thinking she needs a Prince to save her, this is fine with me.  Though Disney is changing things up a bit and making the Princess stories more modern, for instance the Princesses now are stronger and have thrown passivity to the wind.  They take more active roles in the outcome of their lives.  In the Princess and the Frog, Tiana is trying to raise money to start her own restaurant and isn’t interested in finding love.  Love finds her and while she does get married and become a Princess in the end, she still follows her dream and opens her restaurant.  In Tangled, the male character isn’t a Prince, but a thief.  While Eugene helps to free Rapunzel from the witch’s evil grasp at the end of the move, it’s Rapunzel that wakes Eugene from his “sleep” and brings him back to life.  In Brave, Merida is a strong-willed girl who rides horses and explores on her own.  She doesn’t want or need a Prince.  This is one of few Princess movies that doesn’t end with a wedding.  We took Zoey to see Brave in the theaters and she was scared by several of the scenes.   While it has a good message for young girls, I think it’s best to leave this movie for girls older than three. 

At Disneyland Zoey meets Tiana

Zoey doesn’t talk much about the Princes, at this point they’re more of an after thought.  I want her to grow up strong and independent and not searching for someone else to complete her.  I always thought of myself as independent, but remember feeling like I needed a Prince on a white horse to come save me.  I would joke about it, but in a way I really hoped for a savior.  I was always searching for someone to come along and complete me, make me happy.  I know now that that’s not possible.  Another human being can’t complete or make you happy if you aren’t already.  I’d love for Zoey to grasp this concept in her teens and not search for a Prince, but for herself.  When she finds someone to love she’ll know they’re on a journey together, pulling each other up when they need to, but not holding each other up.  She won’t learn this by watching Princesses in movies, she’s going to learn this from me and her dad.

I want Zoey to know that things won’t be handed to her in life, that she can’t sit around waiting for life to happen to her.  She’s in charge of her own happiness, but you know what?  She isn’t thinking about any of this right now.  She’s just a four year old girl that enjoys playing with Princesses in fancy dresses and watching them on TV.  Zoey is still young, too young to think about her looks, falling in love and getting married.  The Disney Princesses will not determine her future, they’re just a distraction as she grows up.  It is to be hoped that Disney will keep strong female role models coming!  Hear that Disney?  Yet even if that doesn’t happen any time soon, for now, and maybe always, I see nothing wrong with letting her dream about happy endings, pretty things and dancing. She’ll have plenty of time to live in the real world, so for now, there’s no harm in letting her live in a fairy tale land for as long as she can.