It's your money so spend it however makes you happy, but kids don't need expensive bikes unless they race IMO. I have 4 kids ranging from 15-19. They have all always had a bike and none of them cost more than $350. My youngest daughter went on a 2 week tour of northern Michigan last summer on a fairly low end Trek mountain bike with some smooth tires, and she told me it was the best bike on the tour for the mixed surfaces they were riding. My 16 year old next-door neighbor races mountain bikes and normally rides a fancy carbon fiber mountain bike. He goes to boarding school and was home for the summer, so I loaned him my 1981 trek 613 for him to try road cycling. He works at a bike shop and did several thousand miles of fast group rides on that bike and told me that keeping up with the group on that bike was not a problem. I went out with him a few times, including one century, and he was fast enough to keep up with me on that bike. At the end of the summer he used the money he earned at the bike shop to buy a carbon Emonda so he can start racing criteriums. When I was 8, I rode RAGBRAI on a 5-speed Schwinn Stingray with drop-bars, stem shifter and a road saddle. Moved up to a Varsity when I outgrew the Stingray and did 5 RAGBRAI's and thousands of training miles on those two bikes by the time I was 12. My thinking is that since kids aren't very fast anyway, expensive lightweight bikes are a waste of money. Racing is a different story obviously. Again, your money, so you should buy your daughter a nice bike if you think it will make riding with her more fun, but go into it knowing that kids grow so you will need to get a bigger one in a couple of years. Zero chance it will fit for 5-6 seasons.