Welcome back to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You, a weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.

I'm Jessica Pfeiffer, and as always, I'm joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hello, Dr. Ken. Jessica,

hi, how are you? I'm good. Hey, I'm going to turn this conversation to something that's helpful for me today. Is that all right? Okay. Forget everybody else. Let's just talk. Forget everybody else.

No, you can listen in. You'll probably gain something from this conversation. If you have specifically girls, but there are some application

here for our young gentleman, too. But I have three daughters, right? So I have one son, three daughters.

One is out of the house. My other two daughters are still at home with me. They're teenagers.

13 and 17. And this topic is a prime importance in our house.

Which is? It is the topic of makeup and hair. And what am I allowed to do? Oh, even nails. Sometimes the nails come into this too. What am I allowed to do? Can I wear makeup? When can I wear makeup? How much makeup? What if you don't like my makeup? All these questions that I get from my girls and things that I'm kind of working through. Yeah, the big starter one is when should you let your daughters wear makeup like at what age right isn't that a right

right well and i feel like i mean everybody has their own kind of starting place right some as

moms moms are like i'm a okay with my third grader wearing makeup if she wants to is that true do you

literally know what they're doing that well you Well, you know, for play, yes,

but then also they start wearing it on the weekends when they were with their friends.

Right, right, right. Right. It wasn't necessarily at school, but all the other times of the week.

Right. Which touches on, I think, the first thing to kind of consider, because, you know,

I've seen so many parents the last few weeks that, you know, they're doing a really good job.

This is trying to be very aware and responsive and emancipating and things like that.

But, you know, you're up against things that are not your fault.

One of them is we don't have a culture that gives it much guidance, like as to, you know, when are we going to all say it's okay for

girls to wear makeup, for example? There's very little we out there. So it makes it harder

to make your own decisions about things, especially with teenagers. And of course, the first thing

I'd remind everybody is that, you know, if you've got a seven and eight-year-old and you're holding firm on whatever your thing is while you, you know,

...