On a warm massage table at Sothys Spa, far from the January chill, Fran Glennon, 52, was cocooned in white terry cloth and enjoying a facial. On another massage table, about 5 feet away, was a smaller cocoon: Glennon’s daughter, Emma, 9.
Emma did not need blackhead extraction or steam to open clogged pores or a massage to stimulate the skin stretched across her delicate little face. Instead, Emma’s aesthetician gently applied to her forehead, nose and cheeks lotions made with mineral water from the city of Spa in eastern Belgium.
“How do you feel?” asked Zina Bekenshtein, the aesthetician, after a mask was rinsed from Emma’s face and a damp cloth peeled from her eyes.
A sleepy looking Emma grinned and half-whispered: ”Gooood.”
More and more, little girls such as Emma are participating in activities that their own mothers might not have experienced until they were adults. It is not unusual to walk into a salon and be seated next to a pre-adolescent girl whose twiggy legs barely reach the pedicure tub or to be dining at a fancy restaurant near a 2nd grader or to encounter a 6-year-old in the gym locker room.
Destination spots
Places once considered adult domains – spas, gyms, restaurants and nail and hair salons – are increasingly becoming destinations for little girls and their mothers.
Samantha White, 28, an assistant at a business consulting firm in Manhattan, said she has noticed more little girls coming in with their mothers to her nail salon, picking out a color and sitting back for the pampering.
“My roommate has a niece who is 7, and she was telling me that every Saturday at 9 a.m. they get manicures,” White said.
The trend is driven in part by a lack of time. Hectic scheduling for parents and children alike makes it challenging for mothers to carve out time for bonding activities, particularly ones that appeal to tweens who by 12 consider monkey bars and Kool-Aid quaint relics of their past.
“Between her activities, my work, you end up trying to fit it all in,” said Glennon, a nurse, as she and Emma sat in the spa’s cafe. “We’re all so busy. Here you’re out of the house so you really can focus on each other. You’re spending time together.”
Emma was 3 when Glennon first took her along to her nail salon because she thought it would be silly to pay for a baby-sitter. Now she takes Emma to the spa for the occasional treat.
Like many other mothers, Glennon cherishes those outings because she knows that soon her little girl will be a teenager and no longer consider it a thrill to follow her everywhere.
Trena Ross, the spa director of Sothys, added that taking tweens to the spa has become a tidy way to eliminate the mommy “guilt factor.”
Said Ross: “I want to spend spa time for myself. I want to spend time with my daughter. Why not get both in one?”
The trend also is the result of what psychologists say is an emphasis on precociousness.
“Today’s teens are mature teens,” said Michael Wood, the vice president of Teenage Research Unlimited. “They are interested in some of those very grown-up activities.”
That has become a boon for spas, with an increase in business drawn by treatments such as My First Manicure, My First Massage and My First Facial, as well as Cinderella Treat and Princess Fizzing Manicure. A spokeswoman for the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes, said mother-daughter spa business has doubled since 2003.
But to bond at these places requires disposable income. At Sothys, the mini-facial for children is $75 (a deep-cleansing facial with exfoliation for adults is $110), and a package that includes a children’s facial, manicure and pedicure can cost $127. (Still, it is possible to get a $10 manicure at a corner salon.)
Rites of passage spoiled
But is it healthy for young girls to be dipping a toe into traditionally adult activities? What rites of passage will they have left to look forward to?
Mothers seeking time with their daughters at the spa, salon or gym say they have concluded that the benefits – intimate conversations, shared relaxation, hygiene lessons, escape from school and family woes – outweigh the potential pitfalls.
Besides, they say, those activities are not the only time they spend with their daughters. There are sleepovers and museum trips and hours playing with the family pet, too.
Psychologists say the assimilation of young girls into adult realms is not a cut-and-dried issue, especially when the activity involves beauty.
Roni Cohen-Sandler, a psychologist in Weston, Conn., and the author of “Stressed-Out Girls: Helping Them Thrive in the Age of Pressure,” said there is no “magic age” that determines what is appropriate.
“These young tweens are growing up with an expectation of doing things earlier and earlier,” Cohen-Sandler said. “And in some ways it’s robbing many of them of that carefree childhood time when they don’t have to be thinking of how they look.”
But Cohen-Sandler said going to a salon for a manicure is actually less harmful at age 5 than at 10 because at 5, “it’s clear to the girls that they are playing grown-up, it’s pretend.”
There is nothing wrong with relishing relaxation and “grown-up” time with one’s mother, she said. But if it leads to obsessing about one’s body and expecting pampering, it can be a problem.
In general, rites of passage involving beauty treatments should accompany puberty, she said. And they should not be things a time-strapped mother grants her daughter because she wants to be seen as fun. “I’m not an advocate of a cool mother,” Cohen-Sandler said.
Linda Carter, the director of the family studies program at the New York University Child Study Center, said it is easy to be critical of the mother who takes her daughter to the manicurist, but what matters, she said, is the mother’s intention and how the child interprets it.
However, Carter cautioned: “If every bonding time is over the manicure table or shopping, then it gives a consistent message that could become a concern. But the occasional manicure? We’ve all done that.”
Invasion resentment
Naturally, there are people who resent having their spa, gym or salon infiltrated by yammering pint-size patrons. And some of them are mothers themselves.
Sherry Davey, who has a daughter, Lily, 4, and a blog called Funny Mom on iVillage.com, said she has developed what she calls a “mommy callus,” which makes her more immune than most to tween riots. And yet.
“It’s like an invasion,” said Davey, recalling with a laugh a group of 8-year-old girls who walked in while she was having her own biweekly manicure in a Brooklyn salon. “It’s adult private time. You kind of want to chill out.”
What also irks some observers is how willing some parents are to drop money on indulgences that children cannot fully appreciate. That gripe taps into a bigger idea about the danger of transforming tweens into material girls.
“It does sort of run the risk of prizing the materialistic over the positive attention and the time together,” said Melba J. Nicholson, a child and family therapist at the Family Institute at Northwestern University, who generally approves of bonding at the spa, gym or salon.
To keep it healthy, she said, mothers should emphasize to their daughters that the hours they share in these places are more significant than the money spent there.
