When you walk up to a little girl, say your four-year-old niece, at her birthday party, you notice that she's dressed up all nice and fancy, so you tell her that she looks gorgeous.

"You look so pretty!!! What a beautiful dress!!! I love your hair!!!"

How many times have you walked up to a young boy and said, "You look so good!! You're so handsome!!!"

Probably not as often. At least, I know that this isn't my first reaction. This isn't what I say first when I see my young boy cousins versus when I see my young girl cousins.

And quite frankly, I'm annoyed by this.

Why do we constantly harp on our young girls' appearances? We're teaching them the same things that media LOVES to teach women — that appearance is everything. That we have to look gorgeous in order to get any attention.

How many times have you walked into a room full of your girlfriends and not heard them compliment something you were wearing or how you looked that day? Were you disappointed? Did your thoughts go to wondering whether what you were wearing looked good or not?

I know I've felt this before. By constantly telling our girls they look pretty, we think that we're boosting their self-esteem, but really we're not. We're just teaching them to care more and more about their looks. And as we all know, that turns into a huge problem for young girls, particularly in high school in their teen years.

What if along with telling little girls they look pretty, we tell them they're smart or strong?What about, along with saying that their drawings are beautiful, we say that we love the choices they made with the colors or that it looks realistic or even just that it's cool?

We need to teach little girls that they are kind, smart, and important as well as beautiful, just like Aibileen says in The Help. It's up to us to teach the next generation to be empowered and strong, to care about their careers and themselves, more than their looks.

But even alongside that, we should tell boys that they are handsome. That they look good and are dressed well. We already tell them they're strong or smart, so let's teach them that they look good too.

Remember the last scene of The Last Jedi? Where the children of Cantonica were the next generation of the resistance, where they were who the resistance was fighting for? Yeah. The children are important, so let's teach them now, so they don't have to learn like we did.