Will her Prince Come?

My daughter recently paused in her twirling around the living room in her pink princess satin night gown to ask me if she could grow up to be a princess. At first I told her no, but since I always try to give factually accurate information to my children (Some conversations have gone astray this way. I should have learned my lesson with the where babies come from conversation), I added that the only way for her to be a princess was if she married a prince.

“So Princes are real?”

“We don’t have any in our country, but they do have princes in other countries.”

“So fairy tales are real?” I was straightening up toys, but the excitement in her voice made me look up and forget a moment that I’d asked them to pick the Wii games up earlier.

She laughed her loud laugh, her face glowing. “I’m going to marry a prince. I want to be a princess when I grow up.”

Ugh. Not quite what I was trying to get across. Had I not taught her that girls can do anything? We don’t need someone to arrive on a white horse and gallop off into the horizon to rescue us from our lives. I never had dreams of being a princess as a child, and I read Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. I wanted to live in an apartment in New York City with a career that made me famous. (I know, I know, but I was a kid). Of course, I also dreamed of being unmarried without children, and I’m divorced with two children. I guess no part of that dream really came true. I don’t think I’d completely thought out that dream.

But her dream is cultivated by the Disney princess machine. Disney makes $4 billion dollars a year on merchandise to sell my daughter the idea that any girl can be a princess. She wears princess night gowns and clothes, watches princess movies and listens to princess movies. She has princess books, dolls and dress up clothes. She’s bombarded by the idea that a prince will come and rescue her and love her forever.

In the culture we live in, probably not the lesson to be teaching. Unless Disney starts bombarding boys with how to treat girls like princesses, I don’t think she’ll find prince charming when she grows up. I teach teenage boys today, and they don't impress me much with their ability to sweep a girl off her feet or even know how to ask a girl out without text messaging it. Love takes more work than the happily ever after of a princess story, and I’ve already taught her that it’s okay to give up. (No, I don’t think that’s what I did, but it’s how it’s interpreted by many).

So how do you tell a five year old that she probably won’t find a prince one day that will make her a princess?

Sigh. You don’t. You nod your head, knowing that she will discover that on her own before you’d like. I changed my dream from when I was a child, but I remember what it was like for everyone to tell me my dreams were unrealistic and I needed a reality check. Who knows what could happen if I just tell her that anything is possible as long as she isn't afraid to make it happen?

And besides, next week it will be a different dream that I will nod my head for. She’s only five and I’m sure tomorrow’s dream may be something more worrying. She does have an imagination like her mother, after all.