Woman Blames 'Fast Girls' On The 'Standards' Certain Moms Have For Their Daughters
You can't expect girls to act like kids when you never let them be kids in the first place.
Omar Lopez / Unsplash Many moms say a child's teen years are even tougher than their "terrible-twos," and when it comes to teenager daughters, one TikToker thinks there's a simple explanation — she chalks it all up to some moms' parenting choices and their own internalized misogyny.
The TikToker says some moms have sexist standards for their daughters that create teen girls who we think of as 'fast'.
TikToker @mishasmusings laid out her view in response to another mom's video blaming permissive parenting for teen daughters becoming "fast" girls. As the mom put it, "you cannot complain about your teenage daughter acting fast, being grown, talking back or nothing if at 13, you was allowing her to wear crop tops."
Misha had a far different take on the matter, though, one she chalked up to two things: many mothers' internalized misogyny, and the standards some moms have for their daughters that hardly allow them to be children in the first place.
"The sad truth is, for a lot of girls, their mom is their first misogynist," Misha said, "and... is there anything more misogynistic than treating a young girl like an adult her whole life and then getting upset when she starts expressing some of the autonomy of adulthood?"
The woman went on to say that many moms' complaints about their 'fast' daughters are just distractions from the actual problems caused by their own awful parenting choices.
Misha went on to underline an all too common problem many girls face while growing up — being thrust into a more adult role in the family, simply by dint of their gender.
As a self-professed "oldest daughter," Misha likely knows this struggle personally, and she called moms like this out for creating the problem they're railing against. "If we keeping it real, y'all not mad about crop tops or lip gloss," she said, "you're mad that she's starting to act like the adult that you have always treated her as anyway, her whole life."
She listed the myriad ways girls are socialized, both in and outside the home, to emulate adulthood long before it's appropriate — things like telling them they're "more mature than boys," and giving them "adult-like responsibilities in the house."
The basic thrust of her argument is that it's not that these girls are "fast" — a retrograde and sexist term in the first place that assumes female sexuality is both dangerous and shameful in a way that boys' isn't — but more so that they are simply acting out the adult roles that were thrust upon them by their parents.
Therapists and parenting experts say Misha is spot on, and the sexist standards some moms have for their daughters often lead to damaging outcomes like parentification.
When it comes to being exposed to sexism at home, most would probably assume it usually comes from fathers. But a 2015 study at the University of Auckland actually found the opposite — "mothers seemed to be the primary role models for daughters’ acquisition of sexist and other social attitudes," the study found, "as well as daughters’ values and career aspirations."
In other words, sexist attitudes like the mom's in Misha's TikTok have much more far-reaching impacts than "growing up too soon" and becoming "fast." It shapes the trajectories of their entire lives. And being shoved into traditionally "female" roles in the home when they're still just children leads to damaging dynamics.
As therapist Kati Morton explains in the video above, parentification "can delay [a child's] emotional development, which... can lead to anger, can cause co-dependent relationships and people-pleasing behavior because [they] weren't able to be a child when [they] needed to."
"One day it clicks for her that she's already been treated as grown and she decides, okay, well, then I'm going to do as grown folks do," Misha said in her TikTok—that is, they become "fast" and "disrespectful."
She closed her video with a blunt proposition for parents like this: "I bet if a lot of y'all started actually treating your young girls as children, you'd find that they don't want to escape childhood so much." Probably solid advice.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.