Raising a Mini-Me (Like Jessica Simpson) May Not Be a Good Idea

Photo: Jessica Simpson/Instagram

Like mother, like daughter! Jessica Simpson shared an adorable photo of her daughter Maxwell on Instagram last week. Mugging for the camera, the 2-year-old sported an updo and glossy bright red lipstick. “Someone got into Mommy’s lipgloss,” the singer wrote. “#POSER.” In another shot the toddler licked her lips clutching a handful of the tubes. “I need to move my lipgloss drawer!” Simpson captioned the shot. “My always get taken by this 2yr old!”

Photo: Jessica Simpson/Instagram

Not that the star really minds. Earlier this year she talked parenting with Good Morning America and admitted she’s proud her daughter wants to mimic her, declaring, “I want Maxwell to look up to me and want to be like me.”

But is having a mini-me really a good idea? Probably not in the long run, child development experts warn.

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“The struggle of adolescence for girls is learning how to stay connected to mom without being a carbon copy,” Linda Perlman Gordon author of Too Close for Comfort: Questioning the Intimacy of Today’s New Mother-Daughter Relationship tells Yahoo Parenting. “If a mother is encouraging her daughter to be just like her, it doesn’t give the child a place to learn the difference between herself and her mom.”

Photo: Jessica Simpson/Twitter

In the early years, copying mom can be a valuable learning tool, explains child development specialist Dr. Robyn Silverman to Yahoo Parenting. “You want kids to adopt your best qualities and the values you consider important,” she says. Dressing alike and sharing makeup at times can be fun bonding too. “If everybody is having a good time, that’s great.It’s when mom is trying to make a duplicate of herself rather than raising an individual that you get into trouble.”

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And she doesn’t just mean who-wore-it-best comparisons. By consistently praising the behavior, attitude and appearance that matches your own, “the child is constantly receiving feedback that she should be like somebody else and it prevents her from listening to her own voice,” says Silverman.

That leaves her very sense of self at stake. “A child who is constantly looking to others for approval and how to behave ends up looking for an outward voice to govern her inner thoughts,” cautions Silverman. Talk about a formula for peer pressure success.  

Ironically Simpson has discussed falling into this very trap herself. “When I was younger and starting out in the music business, I always felt like I was being defined by other people — industry executives, fans, the media, and so on,” she recently told Glamour. “It took a while, but now that I’m in my 30s, I’ve grown into myself and established my identity on my terms.”

When you encourage a child to follow only in your footsteps, “they can miss making footsteps of their own,” explains Silverman.

The trick is to change tacks from encouraging your young one to mimic your behavior to talking up her individual gifts before age 9.

“The tween years, between 9 and 12 are when the problematic issues can really develop if you’re preventing a child from asserting her independence,” psychotherapist Amy Morin tells Yahoo Parenting. “A lot of parents experience grief in the process of letting go, and understanding, for example, that they want to be like their friends now rather than you, but parents have to control their own reactions to that.” Focus on dealing with those feelings, advises the expert, and encouraging the child to explore where her own passions.

“Over-investment in who you think your daughter should be is the problem,” sums up Gordon. “Mothers’ investment should be in finding out who she is going to be.”