It’s easy to imagine that concerns about beauty and appearance are adult preoccupations, but a new study published in Child Development reveals that these worries start much earlier than most of us realize. Researchers have found that girls as young as three already place significant value on personal attractiveness, more so than their male counterparts.
The study sheds light on the early development of gender differences in valuing appearance, suggesting that societal expectations about beauty begin to shape children’s values and identities almost from the moment they begin to understand what it means to be a girl or a boy.
The study was motivated by a desire to understand how and when gender differences in the value placed on personal attractiveness emerge. Previous research has shown that by the time girls reach adolescence, many are already deeply concerned with their appearance, often tying their self-worth to how they look. However, little was known about how early these concerns begin and whether boys share similar preoccupations.
To explore these questions, the researchers recruited 170 children aged three to five years old from child centers in the Los Angeles and Orange County metropolitan areas. The sample was ethnically diverse, with children from Latiné, multiethnic, and non-Hispanic White American backgrounds, reflecting the demographic makeup of the region.
The children were interviewed one-on-one using a series of measures designed to assess how much they valued personal attractiveness. These measures included questions about their preferences for appearance-related occupations, their choices of gender-typed outfits, their memory for fancy clothing items, and their reasons for liking media characters. For example, children were asked to choose between different outfits, some of which were designed to be fancier and more gender-typed, and to recall specific details about clothing items worn by the researcher during the interview.
In addition to these behavioral measures, the children were also asked directly about the importance of being attractive. Girls were asked if they thought it was important to be pretty, while boys were asked if it was important to be handsome. The researchers also assessed the children’s knowledge of gender-attractiveness stereotypes by asking them whether they believed members of their gender needed to be attractive and whether they thought boys or girls cared more about looking good.
Across all measures, girls placed more value on personal attractiveness than boys. For instance, girls were more likely to prefer appearance-related occupations, such as being a ballet dancer or hair stylist, over other types of jobs. They also showed a stronger preference for fancier, more feminine outfits and were more likely to remember and focus on details about clothing and appearance. When asked directly, girls were more likely than boys to say that being pretty was important to them.
“Although young 3-to 5-year-old boys were not necessarily averse to caring about their personal attractiveness, our findings across multiple indicators suggest that they were more moderate in their levels. Young boys tended to score more toward the middle of the scales. Indeed, consistent with our hypothesis, it was striking that across all five measures of personal attractiveness valuing, there was a consistent and significant gender difference with girls valuing personal attractiveness more than boys.”
In addition to valuing attractiveness more than boys, girls also linked this trait more strongly with their gender identity. They were more likely to believe that being a girl means needing to be pretty and that girls, in general, care about their appearance. Boys, on the other hand, were less likely to make these connections, suggesting that attractiveness is less central to their sense of what it means to be a boy.
Interestingly, the study found that these gender differences were not significantly influenced by age within the three-to-five-year-old range. This suggests that girls begin to value personal attractiveness at a very young age, and this valuation remains relatively stable during early childhood.
While the study enhances our understanding of the early development of gender differences in valuing personal attractiveness, it is not without certain limitations. One limitation is that the study relied on self-reported and behavioral measures, which might not capture all aspects of how children value appearance. Future studies could benefit from incorporating naturalistic observations, such as watching how children interact during play or how they get dressed in the morning, to provide a more comprehensive picture.
“At first glance, some might take these findings as ‘obvious,’ but why must these patterns be so expected? We venture that most of us, if not all, are very familiar with cultural and societal expectations for girls and women to be beautiful that persist across the globe (Jeffreys, 2014); so much so that we take our gendered practices for granted,” the researchers wrote.
“For example, a strong female leader must not only be a capable leader but she is often penalized if her appearance is not up to par as well (Gurung et al., 2018). Effective girls and young women who achieve much in school, sports, and extracurriculars often report the burden of feeling like they have to do it all: be good at school, be morally good, and be good-looking (Pomerantz et al., 2013). Yet, observing that girls as young as age 3 are already attuned to these gendered values should, at the very least, give us pause. Our data suggest that young girls are sensitive to cultural values related to beauty as they are first forming their gender identities.”
The study, ““She’s so pretty”: The development of valuing personal attractiveness among young children,” was authored by May Ling D. Halim, Lyric N. Russo, Kaelyn N. Echave, Sachiko Tawa, Dylan J. Sakamoto, and Miguel A. Portillo.
