My daughter is six years old. A few days ago she told me she wasn't sure if she looked like a girl.
Not because she doesn't feel like one. She does. But because the girls around her, across race, across background, have longer hair. She has braids. Natural ones. A shorter length. Beautiful, healthy, real. And somehow, at six, she is already doing the math. Beauty looks a certain way. Femininity looks a certain way. And in order to believe anything else, she needs to see something else.
Then Coco Gauff happened. And I exhaled.
What actually happened
In case you missed it, Coco Gauff, two-time Grand Slam champion and the highest-earning female athlete in the world, shot a campaign for Miu Miu. The concept was Everyday Fashion. She did her own hair. She did her own makeup. It was shot at her parents' house by her social media manager. She used tennis balls as the quirky object in the bag. It was playful, creative, and entirely hers. Miu Miu approved it.
And then thousands of people on the internet had something to say about her hair.
They called it unpolished. Unprofessional. Not appropriate for a luxury brand. Some compared her look to the Civil Rights era and I will leave you to sit with what might be underneath that comparison, and what it means that showing up in your natural hair in 2026 can still read as an act of protest.
Coco responded with an eight-minute video. She explained that she has 4C hair. That she allows herself to present like she has 4C hair because she has 4C hair. That she does not slick her edges back with heavy product because she is an athlete who understands what repeated tension and harsh chemicals do to her hair and her body over time. She said she was not going to apologize. And then she looked directly at the camera and spoke to every young Black girl watching:
Your hair is fine exactly the way it is.
What this moment is really about
As a psychologist, I want to name something clearly: what we see most often is what we normalize. This is not opinion. This is how the brain works. Repeated exposure shapes what our nervous systems register as safe, as beautiful, as belonging. When Black girls grow up in a world where their natural texture is consistently marked as too much, not enough, unprofessional, or out of place that message does not stay abstract. It lands in the body. It lives in the mirror. It shows up at six years old in a question about whether you look like a girl.
And it shows up in the products we reach for.
The Environmental Working Group analyzed over 4,000 personal care products marketed to Black women. Only 21% rated as low hazard. About one in 20 ranked as highly hazardous containing endocrine-disrupting chemicals and carcinogens linked to breast cancer, uterine cancer, and severe hormonal disruption. Research consistently shows that Black women face disproportionate toxic chemical exposure through hair and beauty products. This is not incidental. It is the direct result of a market that has spent decades telling Black women their natural hair is a problem to be solved and then selling them the solution, at significant cost to their health and their wallets.
The pressure to conform has a price. We pay it in our confidence. We pay it in our bodies. And we pass it on to our daughters before they are old enough to understand what they are inheriting.
What I want you to sit with first -- before you talk to your child
I was one of a team of people who worked with NYC Commission on Human Rights on the nation's first legal enforcement guidance protecting natural hair. I produced the documentary Back to Natural in 2017. I have sat with women in my practice who carry the weight of this, the exhaustion of managing not just their hair but the world's reaction to it. And the thing I keep returning to is this:
The conversation with your daughter starts with you.
Before we can help our children see themselves clearly, we have to look honestly at ourselves. What standards are you still performing and for whom? When you reach for the relaxer, the edge control, the silk press is it because it is genuinely your preference, your expression, your joy? Or is some part of it about what is easier to move through the world in? Both can be true simultaneously. There is no judgment here. But awareness matters. Because our children are not just listening to what we tell them about their hair. They are watching what we do with ours.
What you can say to your daughter
You do not need a perfect script. You need presence and honesty. Here are some places to start:
Ask her what she thinks is beautiful, and listen without redirecting. You may be surprised what she has already absorbed and what she is waiting for permission to release.
Show her Coco Gauff's video. Watch it together. Ask her what she thinks about what Coco said. Let her lead.
Tell her the truth in language she can hold something like: "Some people think hair has to look a certain way to be beautiful or professional. That is not true. But a lot of people still believe it, which is why it can feel that way sometimes. Our hair is not a problem. It never was."
Name what you see in her specifically. Not generic affirmations, specific ones. "I love the way your braids frame your face." "Your hair is strong and it grows toward the sky." Children need the particular, not just the principle.
And if she asks why people said those things about Coco tell her the truth at whatever level she can receive it. People sometimes make rules about beauty that were never fair. And people like Coco, and like us, keep showing up anyway.
What Coco did that matters beyond the moment
She did not perform. She did not apologize. She did not modify herself to fit a standard and then ask for credit for being brave. She simply showed up as she was in a high-fashion campaign, on a global stage and said: this is what I look like. This is enough. And if my 4C hair was good enough for Miu Miu, yours is good enough for whatever you need it to do.
I am going to print that campaign image and put it on my daughter's wall.
Not because Coco Gauff is a celebrity. But because my daughter needs to see, repeatedly and in full color, that the math she is doing at six years old has a different answer than the one the world keeps handing her.
A mentor of mine, Dr. Barnes, a psychiatrist who ran a children's psychiatric hospital, has long emphasized the importance of art in our homes that depicts the vast beauty and experiences of Black people. She sees it as foundational to the development of Black children's identity. I think about that often. Because what she is really pointing to goes beyond the paintings and photographs we hang on walls. It is about the totality of what we allow our children to be exposed to. The images, the stories, the public figures, the campaign shoots taken at someone's parents' house on an ordinary afternoon. Every time a Black child sees herself reflected back, in her full texture, her full range, her full humanity, she gets to build her identity on something true rather than something borrowed. Representation is not decoration. It is development.
Culture shifts when enough people refuse to hide. Law follows culture. I have seen that firsthand. But culture follows what we choose to make visible, what we choose to celebrate, and what we choose to put on our walls.
What are you putting on your children's wall?