Disney Princesses are missing a very important feature.
My four-year old daughter wears glasses.
She has two pairs – one neon pink pair, lurid and bright, the other more discreet, my favourite, that show off her big green eyes.
They have neat little cases with patterns of jellybeans printed on them and a teeny-tiny cleaning kit that she was given as a gift.
She is one of millions of children right through the world who wears glasses. No big deal, huh? Except she hates them, passionately, though without them she cannot see.
“Put your glasses on Emme,” I say for the twenty-fifth time each morning, exasperated at seeing them discarded on a bench. “You have to wear your glasses so you can see.”
“I don’t want to Mama. I hate them.”
She casts them aside the minute I am not looking. She hides them in her bed in the morning in the hopes I won’t find them.
She won’t. Won’t. WON’T.
They are “ugly”, “yucky”, “horrible”.
But she needs them desperately. Without them one of her eyes hardly functions at all leaving her in a hazy, under-sea world that she struggles to make sense of.
Her functioning eye does all the work so it has to be patched up to six hours a day to strengthen its impotent partner.
For my daughter, it’s a form of daily torture.
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I have worn glasses since I was eleven and have recently started wearing contacts. However, when I was 16 I went to my secondary school prom and remember vividly refusing to wear my glasses because how could I be pretty with glasses on? I then studied media at A level and I realised that in almost every film, women don't wear glasses. In rom-coms, generally our heroine gets a make-over before she gets the boy. Let's be honest, the only women that are allowed to wear glasses are the stuffy librarian or the horrible teacher. I actually mentioned this in class when we were discussing the diversity of representation in the media and was essentially laughed at. I'm seriously trying to think of any role-model that wears glasses. Maybe I'll be one one day (I am hoping to be an author) but until then children can only be told that they should wear glasses so that they can appreciate the beauty around them. Try the little girl from the BFG (Sophie) or Miss Honey from matilda? Sam Sparks from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (although she doesn't wear them at the start of the film, she does at the end and in the squeal). Hope any of this helps and one day we can have more representation of those of us who can't see without putting two pieces of glass on our face or poking ourselves in the eye with some plastic. :)
Does your girl like Barbie? There is Barbie in the Fashion tale story and one of the main female characters wear glasses and she is beautiful, talented, friendly.