For more than a decade, I’ve been refraining from commenting on student’s physical appearance, both negatively or positively. It’s a policy I explain to parents and students at the beginning of the year, and it’s one that my students have always appreciated.
My reasons are many.
- There are far more important qualities in a child worth commenting on than the way a student looks.
- Children often have little control over their appearance. Choice of clothing and hairstyle is often dictated by parental preference and the family’s income level and hardly represents any true fashion sense.
- Comments on physical appearance – even when positive – create a culture where physical appearance matters.
- Comments on physical appearance are often skewed by culture, age, sex, and personal history.
- When you compliment on a little boy’s suit or a little girl’s dress, you risk unintentionally and unknowingly insulting the little boy or girl whose family can’t afford a suit or dress.
I could go on and on.
Beginning this year, I’ve extended my policy to include all people save my wife, children, and mother-in-law. Except for these four people, I refrain from commenting on the physical appearance – positively or negatively – because I want to live in a world where physical appearance is less important than a person’s actions, words, and deeds.
Not everyone thinks these policies are brilliant. Quite a few find them unrealistic and fruitless. A few have pushed back hard on my position. To my knowledge, no one has adopted my policy for themselves.
Until now.
My friend, Kathy, recently sent me information from Eden Village Camp where one of her cousin’s sons is working as a Counselor in Training this summer. The camp has a policy called BodyTalk which states that campers are not permitted to comment on anyone’s appearance whether positive, negative or neutral.
They explain their rationale in great detail on their website, but one section that I liked a lot was this:
“If you tell me “You have great hair,” for a minute it might feel nice and I might feel a certain kinship with you and obviously it’s not the end of the world. But physical compliments are still judgments on our appearance. This time the verdict was positive; next time it might not be. The scrutiny adds pressure on me to provide an encore, to spend time grooming my hair tomorrow too, so as to continue receiving approval. I might privately hate my hair and wonder whether you actually really like my hair or just want to bring attention to it, or if I’ve received many such compliments I might be concluding that my hair is important to making me valuable. I might wonder why you never compliment my clothing. If others witnessed the compliment, those people might be thinking “I wish my hair looked like that! Maybe I should get it chemically treated,” etc. In short, it’s a whole lot of mental noise. And that’s just for a compliment!
Bonding via appreciations is great – we encourage more meaningful ones, like specific ways in which someone inspires you or a time you noticed someone doing something kind.”
I encourage you to check out their webpage that explains the policy in full. It’s a reasonable, rationale, and respectful way of running a summer camp, and frankly, it’s the way every school in America should be run as well.
Teachers may not be able to control the comments that students make about each other, but they can certainly control what they say to children themselves. There is absolutely, positively no reason for a teacher to make a comment on a student’s physical appearance ever. It’s purposeless, potentially harmful, and completely non-productive.
If you’d like to read more about my thoughts on the subject, here are some previous pieces stretching back almost a decade:
My brand new, completely unrealistic, possibly supercilious goal that you should try, too.
Complimenting an item of clothing is the lowest form of compliment
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At face value, I think your comment makes a lot of sense. It is very reasonable and logical.
But then I think about the biological benefit to complimenting appearance, especially of children. Much of our psyche (our passions and drives) are geared toward the preservation of our species. A part of this is, of course, replication. Of finding a good mate. Sex and companionship make us happy because they are imperative to the propagation of humankind. But finding a "good" mate is driven by our attraction to that other individual. Appearance plays a part, not just in our species, but most. The reason is obvious. Appearance provides clues to the fitness of that other individual. Our tendency to compliment appearance may be a beneficial means to steer a person’s appearance so that they are better able to find a potential mate. If this is true, then by not complimenting students you are putting them at an evolutionary disadvantage. If my child goes out every day without combing his hair and with food smeared across his face and I never say something, it is more likely that he will continue to do that even once he gets older. I would imagine that he will have a harder time getting dates, if this did continue.
Therefore, even though your intentions are superb, maybe your actions will cause certain students to never find that soul mate that would bring them happiness? If we believe in survival of the fittest, maybe if no one ever comments on their appearance their genes will be wiped from existence.
(As you probably know, I don’t often comment on anyone’s appearance, except when directly asked. But, I raise these points, because I see that there may be an evolutionary reason why people are predisposed to comment on appearance.)