If you think Katie Price is a bad mother for letting her daughter wear make-up, it's you who has the problem

A big part of growing up for me was playing with Barbie. She epitomised what a ‘grown-up woman’ did and was in life: she was married Ken, she lived in her dream house, she went out with her varied group of diverse and politically correct friends, she zoomed around in her hatchback, she had the equivalent of an 18-inch waist… Oh, wait.

Do people remember this? Are they now mentally scarred because they have not lived up to the idealistic dream of Barbie and her dream life? Probably not. So why in God’s name are we chastising an 8-year-old girl for experimenting with make up?

Poor Princess Tiaamii, the young daughter of Katie Price, has been plastered over every tabloid this week, with her mother publicly criticised for allowing her darling to wear heavy make-up during a dressing up game. This was swiftly followed up by Princess herself posting on social media (via her mother, of course), letting us know that it’s her prerogative to dress up in any way she pleases, and that actually it’s none of anybody’s ‘beeswax’.

And she is completely correct: it is none of our business. If a mother wishes to allow her child to experiment with make-up, as a game or a bonding exercise (which, it seemed to me, was what was occurring between Price and her daughter), then so be it. The issue, to my mind, is not about the perceived sexualisation of a child – it’s about society’s expectations of young girls, women and mothers in particular.

Katie Price has fallen prey to the media expectation of mothers as pinnacles of virginal virtue. She has allowed her child to experiment with what we perceive as an adult practice, therefore she has failed as a mother. One would think she had bought the 8-year-old a pack of condoms, a packet of cigarettes and a prescription for the Pill.

The discussion surrounding whether Princess is “doomed to follow in her mother’s footsteps” is, in fact, the true poison of sexualisation. In seeing a child imitating her mother in mascara and lipsticks, it’s been extrapolated that she’s on the path to becoming a glamour model. When exactly did the dressing up box become so fraught?

It’s important to point out that there’s nothing wrong with choosing to become a glamour model, and nothing about Katie Price’s career choices that affects her ability to be a mother. As a woman who has openly spoken about sex in the past and posed for titillating photoshoots, Price has been cast as a fairytale villain: too sexual, too open, too outspoken to make sensible decisions about her child. Ironic, really, considering she was dressing up as the Wicked Fairy in the first place.

Women’s lack of adherence to societal rules of conduct is always used as a stick with which to beat them. But what you’re seeing here is a child experimenting with her mother’s clothes and make-up. It is natural, it is normal, and if you read something sinister in it, you should check yourself.

If any young woman reading this recalls being a child, they should think back to how they felt and perceived the world back then.

Surrounded by women on television, on billboards, in magazines, on adverts targeted at them, coated in make-up, how is it so alien to us that young girls would then want to imitate this within their lives? It is a natural response for children to be curious about what they are exposed to – and if society truly wants to protect children from the harms of this sort of experimentation, then perhaps advertising regulations should be reviewed. That might actually have an effect, rather than launching an unfair attack on a mother allowing her child the freedom to play.