Some four or five years ago, the Sunday “Parade” magazine ran a cover article on the actress Sandra Bullock in which they quoted her with a wonderful line. “What makes you different,” she said in huge letters on the front cover, “makes you beautiful.” I thought it was a maxim for the ages and eagerly devoured the article, only to discover that the writer included the line in the final paragraph of the story and it was never elaborated on. I was disappointed, because it’s one of those lines which, if original with Sandra, surely carries a history.

A couple of times every year, I find myself talking with teenagers about their self-esteem. No segment of our society struggles more with issues of personal acceptance than American teenagers, particularly in their early teen years, and most especially, the girls. Somewhere in the presentation I never fail to drop in that line, assuring them that they should not try to look like everyone else, that “what makes you different makes you beautiful.”

Now comes a movie which uses that line in its advertisements. My wife and I took our eleven-year-old granddaughters Abby and Erin to see “Penelope” Saturday afternoon. Margaret said the girls chose the movie; I was drawn to it by the desire to see what the movie did with this truism which had imbedded itself in my mind ever since Sandra Bullock coined it. Assuming she did.

“Penelope” is the story of a girl born with a pig’s snout and ears, the result, we’re told, of a curse on the family by a witch from a couple of centuries back. Only when the child thus cursed is successfully wed to a blue-blood “for better or for worse, til death do they part,” will the curse be lifted. When the child is born, the parents are mortified and hide her inside their mansion until she is of marriageable age. They are revolted by her appearance and so is every suitor whom they parade by her as a possible mate. We the viewers never quite see what all the excitement is about. She has a wide turned-up nose, but is not the monster they all make her out to be.

Eventually, the curse disappears–not as a result of a wedding, but simply when Penelope quits hiding and says, “I like myself the way I am”–and she becomes “normal,” whatever that means. In this case, it means she gets the nose of actress Christina Ricci who plays her. A child in a class Penelope tells the story to suggests that the moral of the story is that a curse has only the power we grant it. It’s true, but too profound to come from the mouth of a seven-year-old.

Margaret and I have six granddaughters ranging in age from Leah’s 18 down to JoAnne’s 10. In between come Jessica, 16, Darilyn, 10, and Abby and Erin. As far as we can tell at this point, none are struggling with issues of self-acceptance, but one never knows, and such obsessions can rear their ugly heads at any moment. Convincing a child to accept herself the way God made her is not an easy task under normal circumstances, and is complicated by those rare cases where the child really does need some cosmetic surgery.

Now, I recognize that this business of “what makes you different makes you beautiful” works only up to a point. Two heads and four noses would make you different, but not beautiful. A wart in the middle of your forehead would make you different, but nothing more. The tattoos young people seem to crave certainly do make them different but I’ve not seen one yet that made them beautiful. If anything, they detract from the handiwork of the Creator.

The bottom line for me at least–and I try to get this across to my audience of teenagers–is that even better than accepting oneself is to forget yourself. Do not focus on what you look like or what others think of how you look. The simple fact is they’re not paying that much attention to you and are worrying too much about what others think of them. When you learn that, you have taken a giant stride into maturity.

When our son Neil was a teenager, Margaret was out of town for a few days and I was “Mister Mom.” He came into the kitchen where I was preparing breakfast and said, “Dad, I don’t have any clean jeans.” I said, “Wear the ones you wore yesterday.” He said, “I can’t do that. What would Chris think?”

I said, “Son, what did Chris have on yesterday?” He couldn’t answer. I said, “And he won’t remember what you wore either, so wear them.”

He wore yesterday’s jeans and survived without a lick of trauma to his psyche.

I suggest to the teens that they pay attention the next time they are in a gathering with a lot of teenagers, the kind where everyone is talking with each other. Notice the most popular girl in the room–not the prettiest or most vain, not the head cheerleader who is holding court for her admirers–and watch what she is doing. She is the one who knows people’s names, who makes you feel special, who likes you for who you are, and is not looking over your shoulder to see who else just came in. In short, she is not worried in the least about what others think of her because she accepts herself the way she is, and does not waste a lot of time in the two most useless pursuits on the planet: obsessing with her appearance and wondering what other people think of her.

“For by the grace given to me, I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he should think. Instead, think sensibly, as God has distributed a measure of faith to each one.” (Romans 12:3)

It’s not just for teenage girls, either. All of us have to work at taming the ego and restraining the preoccupation with self, no matter our sex or age.

No one says it’s easy. But that’s the goal we all strive toward.