Olympian Dawes Pushes Girls' Self-Esteem

Feb. 5, 2006 — -- Dominique Dawes, who was part of America's gymnastics dream team at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, is now taking on a new challenge helping young girls have a healthy self-image. And she's teaming up with Dove to target an unlikely audience in an ad during tonight's Super Bowl -- dads.

Dominique Dawes: I open up about the struggles that I went through as a young child and even as a young adult -- the issues of self-esteem that I did deal with, or times of self-doubt, even after winning an Olympic gold medal, never feeling as if at times I was good enough or [that] I was pretty enough.

When I was a young girl, I was short, I was very muscular and I had a very squeaky voice. And that wasn't seen so nicely in elementary [school], middle school or high school, even. I remember many times in school feeling very insecure.

And I started, you know, taking a passion toward that when I became an adult. And I saw a lot of other young girls going through those same things -- either having to do with body image, acceptance -- feeling pressures from their peers or others around them.

Young girls are watching TV. They're, you know, looking at magazines, and they're-- That's pretty much determining what the definition of beauty is all about. And as we're realizing, that's a very unattainable definition of beauty. One in four young girls feel as if they're pressured by the media to have a perfect body. Well, what is a perfect body? When people see the Super Bowl ad, they're going to be captured not only by the young girls' faces, how adorable and how beautiful they are. But what they're going to be caught off guard by is how the girls perceive themselves.

We hope that it'll open up a dialogue about real beauty. We hope that it'll open up a dialogue between the father and the daughter -- and the dad realizing that his words, how he says them, what he says, his interaction with his daughter, has a profound effect on her self-esteem. And we want dads to sit with their little girls and communicate to them how beautiful they are, and really get to know what makes your little girl tick.