So I’ve started brushing my daughter’s hair.

She’s 7. It’s time.

Some would disagree it’s past time. Some would disagree she has spent a improved partial of her life looking rather unkempt.

• Heidi Stevens

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I would respond with one word: Jessie.

Jessie is a ideally coiffed suggested star of a Disney Channel uncover about a 19-year-old Manhattan nanny. She’s discerning with a scathing one-liners, doubtful by her life and wracked with insecurities about boys and accessories.

Her hair, though, is fantastic. As illusory as London’s from “The Suite Life on Deck” and CeCe’s from “Shake It Up” and Ally’s from “Austin and Ally.”

I know all about their hair since my daughter loves their shows with a same turn of fervour that we persevere to hating them.

The Disney princesses are always entrance in for parental flack — they’re too doe-eyed, too empty-headed, too prince-reliant. But a princesses are child’s play. They might be abandoned of career ambitions, though during slightest they provide people well. (Animated people, though still.)

Disney’s tween and teen characters, finished for elementary-schoolers, are wretched. Many of them are derisive and disrespectful and petty, and they’ve jam-packed a marketplace so that even if we extent screen-time exposure, they and their hair will still call out to your child from wardrobe lines and lunchboxes and stickers during a pediatrician’s office.

What does all this have to do with brushing my daughter’s hair?

Until recently, she could not be bothered. Washing her hair was torture. Brushing it was a rubbish of her time. She eyed bows with a same disregard she leads during tomatoes.

I desired this. we desired that she approached birthday parties and open musicals and initial days of propagandize with nary a peek toward her hair.

“Should we brush your hair?” I’d ask, customarily on a proceed out a door.

“Nah,” she’d constantly reply.

And that always felt like a victory. Like she was headed out to suffer whatever we were about to suffer for a perfect experience. Not for a possibility to demeanour lovable in photos or uncover off her headband.

Once we arrived, she’d always dive in with desert — not a impulse spent wondering if her braids would come lax or her curls would drop.

She was a discord of Jessie. Now she wants me to brush her hair. Sometimes she brushes it herself. The other day she asked me to re-create a braid in an American Girl repository and didn’t worry stealing her disregard for my mild rendering.

Have a Disney gals’ glossy cascades of thick, poetic tresses tangled themselves around my daughter’s psyche? Is she reserved to years of station in front of a counterpart feeling defeated? Has she already alike beauty with recognition and recognition with power?

I suspect it’s time to proceed this subject with a small some-more nuance. Good bathing is frequency a same as shoal mania with one’s looks. Certainly we can concede her — inspire her, even — to take honour in her coming and suffer a small bursts of tranquillity that come from amatory a proceed she looks.

Certainly we can learn her there’s room for her coming on her list of priorities (just hopefully not during a top). And whatever form her coming takes — coiffed hair, pinkish hair, shaved hair, Jessie hair — it shouldn’t establish where she fits in a universe or how she treats a people in it.

Certainly we can do all in my energy to keep her from apropos scathing and disrespectful and sparse (plus doe-eyed, empty-headed and prince-reliant).

Which all reminds me of Jon Stewart’s new remark on “The Daily Show,” in light of a strap over Disney’s sexing adult a “Brave” character, Merida.

“You have an arrangement with a relatives of America,” he faux-scolded Disney executives. “Our pursuit is to make certain a children are sitting in front of a screen. Your pursuit is to lift them right. If we keep training them a wrong lessons, afterwards we’re going to have start doing it ourselves. And that’s not cool.”

hstevens@tribune.com

Twitter @heidistevens13