This morning I was a scientist studying lions and a magic doctor healing giraffes. I was a three-year-old girl holding a baby jaguar; I was a pony running through a candy forest. I was friends with a lion, a little girl, a pony, and finally, a princess.

The princess, my 3-year-old daughter Rosie, put on a pink and white nightgown. "I think this twirls," she said, experimenting. "I must be a princess!"

Like any modern mom, I'm wary of Cinderella eating my daughter. I decided it was time to conduct some research. "What do princesses do?" I asked."I don't know," she said, disinterested. "They organize things." Then, she added nonchalantly, "Sometimes people think I'm a princess … because they think I'm pretty. Hey Mom, chase me!"

I'm relieved that Rosie consistently chooses to play tag or lions before playing princess, especially if what makes a princess a princess is just beauty.

Let me be clear: I have nothing against twirly skirts, telling our daughters that they are beautiful, or fairy tales with happy endings. I enjoy love stories, including my own, which, incidentally, began a long time ago in a faraway land and involves a strong man with kind eyes.

I have nothing against princesses, when they are done right. But I do tend to get up in arms when the story told - especially by Christians - to my daughter features a beautiful, silent, passive, nameless teenage princess who needs only a man chosen for her to marry in order to have a happy ending.

Stories matter, and in this formative period in which my daughter can remember the words to a book after hearing it only once or twice, I'm careful about what she hears, especially if she's hearing about God. That's why I find The Princess and the Three Knights (Zonderkids 2009), by Christian romance novelist Karen Kingsbury, so troubling.

After an epigraph from 1 Corinthians 13:4,7, the picture book tells of a King who seeks a worthy knight to marry his daughter, "the fairest one in all the land" whose "greater beauty" comes from within. Many knights engage in contests to win her hand until three suitors remain. In the final competition, each knight is challenged to ride toward the edge of a cliff imagining that he carries the princess, to see who can get closest to the edge. The third knight, however, refuses to take part because he loves the princess and "would never take her anywhere near that cliff." With his answer, the knight wins, for he shows that he understands that "true love always protects."

Perhaps, in summary, the tale sounds heartwarming. Protection is, after all, something every parent desires for her children. But was this princess a protagonist I wanted my daughter to identify with? Was this how I wanted my daughter to understand the meaning of love?

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Throughout the story, the princess is never given a name. She is described as beautiful, "inside and out," but we are told nothing else about her. Although she is a title character, she is not truly the book's subject. Not once in 30 pages does Kingsbury give the princess words. The king speaks. The knights speak. The common people speak. The girl, not a word.

From beginning to end, the princess acts twice. First, during the final competition, she stands "a little closer to the king, her eyes wide and fearful." Second, when the king chooses her husband, she feels "her heart take flight." While the men can make decisions, face challenges, and write essays, and while the crowd roars and yells, marvels and claps, the princess hardly moves a muscle.

What did this princess need for a happy ending? Only one thing: a suitable husband chosen for her by her father.

The companion book for boys, Kingsbury's The Brave Young Knight (Zonderkidz, 2011), which I found on display in our public library last week, is similarly disturbing. A nameless boy competes with other knights to become the prince of all the land. He wins - not because of his speed, cleverness, or strength, but because he competes with integrity while the other knights cheat. It's a story I wouldn't mind reading to my son (though because of its lack of creativity, I probably wouldn't choose it).

The real problem begins when I read both books to my daughter. Suddenly she's hearing that girls are passive and boys are active. That a girl's happy ending is all about marriage, but a boy's happy ending is about power and work, not love at all. While the princess's story is dominated by men, the only woman who appears in the knight's tale is an old woman whose load he offers to carry. Put the two books together, and my daughter is learning that women need to be beautiful and quiet and protected, while men need to work diligently and with integrity. That's reductive, and it's not what I want my daughter to believe.

No, this passive princess is not one I want my daughter to dream of becoming.

I want my daughter to understand 1 Corinthians 13 in a deeper way. Rather than living only to be loved and protected, I want her to live to love and protect. While I hope those who love her will "bear all things" for her, I also want her to bear all things for them.

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Girls don't need a father to make all their choices for them. They need a father to teach them how to, over time, make wise choices for themselves. Girls don't need to sit around yearning for brave, clever, caring, skillful husbands. They need to learn to be brave, clever, caring, and skillful themselves.

So Karen Kingsbury goes to the bottom of our family's book stack. If we Christians are going to use the conventional princess trope, we need to redeem it, not just repeat it with a thin gloss of scripture on top. My daughter can be a princess, but she will be a princess like Elizabeth of The Paper Bag Princess, Irene of The Princess and the Goblin, or maybe even that Disney princess, Belle, who loves her father sacrificially, acts courageously, hates pretension, values character above beauty, and seeks "adventure in the great wide somewhere." Because as long as I have power to suggest heroines to Rosie, I will be choosing girls of great character, men and women who will inspire my daughter to herself become a woman of wisdom and bravery and action that she is equipped by God to be.

In between rounds of tag and trips to the library, Amy Lepine Peterson teaches at Taylor University in Indiana. You can connect with her on Twitter @amylpeterson.

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