The self-esteem of a 14-year-old girl is always in flux, and usually in a bad way. It's around the age when you start developing insecurities about what you look like since your body is changing and the attention you get is changing along with it. You become more aware of your clothing choices, the way you wear your hair, and how others perceive you. And those insecurities can be very hard to shake, even into adulthood. What happens to us as children can shape who we become as adults, and if there are people telling us we need to change the way we are in order to fit in, we might start to believe them.
And all that dreck is certainly present even without adults telling us. So it's the responsibility of the grown-ups to be a counterweight to all that, not part of the issue. But one woman had a different philosophy and foisted it on another woman's kid. Read on for the story.