I have often thought of a conversation that took place when my girls were little. Abby was perhaps 5 or 6 at the time and Michaela just working her way through the “terrible twos” (which for our kids always happened when they were three or four). A stranger saw me interacting with them one day and said, “Just wait until they are teenagers!” It sounded foreboding. It sounded like he was predicting dire days ahead.
I spoke to a couple of friends after that, both of whom were a few years ahead of me in parenting. They said something that stuck with me: Much more challenging than the teenage years are the preteen years. It’s when they are 10 or 12 that they—and you—are likely to have deeper struggles. And, as it happens, they were right. The teenage years were a delight, but the preteen years were much tougher.
While I have no experience of being a preteen girl, I have plenty of experience observing and living up close-up with them—three sisters, two daughters, eight nieces, and so on. It has seemed to me that there are few things more difficult than being a girl who is between childhood and adulthood, a girl who is in those formative preteen, tween, or early teenage years.
This is exactly the demographic Kristin Wetherell means to reach in her new book What Makes You Beautiful. Written as a series of 20 daily devotions, she specifically addresses the matter of beauty. If this matter of beauty has always been pressing for young girls, it must be especially so in a world of social media where each person is expected to present a curated, filtered, Instagrammable version of themselves and their lives. If it has always been difficult to separate visible beauty from the hidden beauty of the heart, how much more so today?
Wetherell begins the book with a poem, then returns to a portion of it in each chapter. She slowly helps girls understand that where the world around them will pressure them to conform to worldly expectations, God means for them to be increasingly transformed to his image. God delights in them in such a way that his foremost concern is not how they look, what they accomplish, or how popular they become, but their heart, their character, and their conformity to his will. This is a crucial message girls need to hear, believe, and internalize in these formative years.
What Makes You Beautiful is beautifully created with an inviting cover, a feminine color palette, and artistic imagery. It is written in an appropriate tone that is not quite grown up, but also not childish. It includes pages for readers to take notes and suggestions for future reading in both the Bible and other Christian books.
While my girls are now well past those preteen years, and therefore beyond this book, it is one I would have eagerly given to them had it existed when they were at that age. It is one that I’m certain would have ministered to them and blessed them. Thus, I’m confident that if you have daughters who are heading into those formative years, it will serve them well.
