Body Positivity: Don’t Weigh Your Daughter
Introduction:
By age eight, Amber understood the meaning of the word diet. She knew it wasn’t a reference to eating but rather a word for restricting food intake to shape one’s body. At a very early age, she accepted that she must limit, watch, and manage what she ate because it would affect her weight. When she was in elementary school, her parents suggested that she try to diet to lose a little weight. Amber indicates that she wasn’t what you might call fat but was certainly bigger than her peers. She wasn’t aware of what she should look like, but she knew she didn’t look like her parents thought she should.
Because our society values thinness in women, Amber’s parents wanted to protect her from the bullying and teasing that often accompanies having a bigger body. Amber’s parents weighed her weekly to help her understand her progress. Soon, Amber began severely restricting her eating and chose a sport where dieting was a norm, and coaches reinforced this idea that she had to change her body to be competitive. Amber struggled with her body image throughout her middle school and high school experiences, never feeling that she was “good enough.”
Body Image and Girls
Body image, an essential aspect of self-image, develops from interactions with parents, peers, and significant adults in preadolescence. By the age of 10 or 11, the internet has become an increasingly important player in a girl’s perception of her body. Social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram reward those desirable looks, shapes, and styles with likes and followers. Influencers are rewarded with sponsorships and products. The message is the same as it’s always been. Women are taught to seek an often-unobtainable perfection with their bodies, and most women are dissatisfied with their look or shape.
Social media has taken this message and amplified it through the intimacy of one’s phone. Many studies link social media use and poor body image, making the case for our daughters to have more significant struggles with viewing their bodies positively. We know that as a young girl’s body image becomes more stable and the distance between their desired image and the perceived image becomes more apparent, the risk for negative psychological consequences increases. Some girls begin to skip meals or hide food to deal with their guilt about eating and weight. More and more teens are considering plastic surgical procedures like rhinoplasty or breast augmentation, lip fillers, cryotherapy, liposuction, and gastric bypass surgery. Even our boys are suffering from unrealistic body requirements in the media.
I recall constantly feeling self-conscious about my body and worried I would just be happier if I had a bigger bust, smaller thighs, or if I was not so tall. Even after the Barbie movie and in recent statistics in 2023, over 80% of American women have referred to themselves as fat. And this is not just an American problem– one study I read noted that negative body image is a worldwide problem.
So, the problems with body image are immense. There are ways we can chip away at these forces to help our daughters. We can reexamine our own relationship with our bodies and focus on a sense of wellness and health rather than thinness. We can talk to our daughters about health rather than diet and exercise. We can monitor our comments to our daughter so that we talk about other parts of her- rather than just what she looks like. And we can teach our husbands, partners, and sons to have more realistic views of their bodies and women’s bodies. The fat jokes, the oversexualized jokes, and any joke about appearance should not receive attention.
Ways to Support Your Daughter
Do more:
Evaluate your comfort level with your body and maintain a healthy skepticism of the messages you are receiving about the “perfect” body image. Challenge yourself to accept your body, and your self-acceptance will be a model for your daughter.
Practice healthy positive comments about yourself and your daughter.
Notice more than just “how your daughter looks” when you greet her or
Help your daughter understand the difference between a healthy body and a desirable appearance and that a desirable appearance may not always mean a healthy body.
Teach your daughter to eat healthy foods and focus on vitamins, protein, and vegetables instead of foods that “help you lose weight”
Notice the beauty in different people at different ages. Talk about the beauty in all sizes and shapes in your conversations.
Seek help from a therapist as soon as possible if you think your daughter’s weight is causing her distress. Early intervention is most important.
Talk to your teen daughters about “the conspiracy” in society to control women’s weight- teens often respond well to protesting things or helping to fight for more social justice.
Do less:
Don’t set goals for a particular weight, waist size, dress size, or style, which may simply not be within your daughter’s biology.
Be careful of talking too much about food or your own weight or perceived “problem areas”
Try not to focus all your attention on how your daughter looks.
Try to lessen your daughter’s time on social media
For more perspectives on navigating the opportunities and challenges of body positivity with your daughter, listen to Episode 010: Raising Body Positive Daughters. In this episode, Vince, Lisa, and Margaux talk about our experiences and challenges of raising daughters to like their bodies.
