This back-to-school season, a new style is trending among young Black girls.
Videos of a middle schooler getting their “first lace front” have racked up millions of views on TikTok and Instagram, reigniting a debate about adultifying young Black girls
I’m not here to tell any parent how to raise their children. But as a Black woman who came up in a very different beauty culture, I have to question what we are really doing when we hand a 9-year-old a beauty standard built for grown women?
When I was in grade school, our options were braids, cornrows with barrettes and beads, twists, maybe a press-and-curl for picture day. Serena and Venus Williams dominated tennis courts in beaded cornrows that became iconic precisely because they were age-appropriate. I wore African threading, a protective style my mother did for me to keep my hair neat.
Lace fronts say something else. They mimic hairlines. They require lifting, plucking, and gluing, adult processes and adult upkeep mapped onto a child’s head.
This isn’t really about hair. It’s about what the trend asks of Black girls before they’re ready to be asked anything.
Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality spent nearly a decade researching what it calls “adultification bias”, the tendency of adults to view Black girls as older, less innocent, and less in need of protection than their peers, starting as young as age 5.
Every time we dress a child in the aesthetics of adulthood and call it empowerment, we reinforce – whether we mean to or not – the idea that she was never fully seen as a child to begin with.
Supporters of the trend argue it’s about confidence and self-expression, about giving girls the tools to feel good in their own skin early. I understand that impulse. Representation matters, and there’s nothing wrong with a girl wanting to look and feel beautiful. But confidence built on an adult beauty standard is concerning. It teaches a girl that her natural hair, in its natural stages, isn’t enough on its own, that she needs a costly install to be seen as polished and camera-ready before she’s old enough to drive.
It is the only stretch of life Black girls get before the world starts asking them to perform, to produce, to prove themselves worthy of grace that’s handed freely to everyone else. Handing a Black girl an adult beauty standard before she’s had the chance to figure out who she is without one doesn’t accelerate her confidence, at least if you are thinking long term.
Parents know their children, and there are reasons, protective styling, hair health, and personal choice, that have nothing to do with rushing anyone toward adulthood. But as a culture, we should be honest about what we’re celebrating when a lace front becomes back-to-school shopping-list material for an 8-year-old.
Let Black girls wear the beads. Let them wear the braids, the puffs, and the twist-outs. Let them be little, loud, uneven, and unfinished, because that’s what being a kid is supposed to look like. There will be plenty of time to grow.
