A mum teared up when she learned an important lesson about self-love unexpectedly from her daughter.
Alaya, from the US, explained her five-year-old daughter, Annie, was scrolling through her phone looking at photos on her camera roll.
“Annie asked why most of the pictures are of her and the ones that do have me in them, why do I focus mostly on her?” the mum wrote on Instagram.
“I stumbled with my answer. I didn’t want to use any negative self-talk phrases with her, so my answer was very generic.”
Instead of brushing it off, Annie responded by saying to her mum: “Mumma, you are beautiful just like me.
“You have beautiful brown eyes and big curly hair. I have beautiful brown eyes and straight hair... We’re different and the same at the same time!
“We’re both beautiful.”
Alaya said she teared up hearing her daughter’s words and then smothered her with kisses.
“After this interaction with her, I promised her we’d take more pictures together,” the mum explained.
“Your children don’t care what you look like, they simply want to be with you in the same picture.
“So stop thinking: ‘I’ll be in the picture after I lose seven pounds’ or ‘after my acne clears up’ or ‘once I get these braces off my teeth’ because the more you try to avoid pictures, the more you may regret it in the future.”
The call for mums to have more photos with their kids has been brought up before.
In February 2017, a mum urged men to take more photos of women with their kids. Sophie Cachia, an Australian mum who blogs at ‘The Young Mummy’, shared a photo her husband took of her chilling on the sofa with their son Bobby.
She wrote an open letter to “men” from “mums”, writing: “Dear men, take the photo. Take the God damn photo.
“We spend days capturing beautiful moments of you and the kids. So whenever you see one of us with our babies, a beautiful candid moment, take the bloody God damn photo.”