Katherine Heigl: I Want My Daughter To Know Her Worth

When actress Katherine Heigl recently stumbled upon an episode of Lifetime's reality show Dance Moms, she was left "horrified" by the spectacle.

"I watched with open-mouthed amazement as girls as young as seven were encouraged to dress provocatively and shimmy around a stage doing a dance performance that could just as easily been a burlesque routine. I kept thinking all these girls were missing is a pole!" the 27 Dresses star, who is mom to 3-year-old daughter Naleigh, writes in her latest iVillage post.

Despite being in show business herself, Katherine says that she worries about the impact that these types of reality shows and other beauty-obsessed media have on young girls.

"I believe a significant part of my role as a mother to a daughter is to shelter and build up her self-esteem," she writes, adding, "My hope is that Josh and I will help Naleigh find her strengths, support, inspire, applaud, and shelter her as she succeeds and fails in them and work diligently and persistently to build and protect her fragile self-worth -- because it is fragile and in the world we live in today, it doesn’t seem to be enough of a priority for our young women."

Reinforcing a sense of self-worth in their daughter is very clearly a task that the former Grey's Anatomy star and her husband Josh Kelley take seriously.

"It breaks my heart that the task of raising well-rounded, happy young adults has been made to be so very challenging, but I will rise to the challenge because Naleigh deserves the same shot at living up to her potential as I got," Katherine insists. "My mother taught me strength, courage, discipline, and faith so I will rely on those lessons now to teach my daughter the same."

Read Katherine Heigl's entire post at iVillage.com