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Mom, Do I Look Fat?
By the time the average girl finishes middle school she will have been exposed to over 350,000 television and magazine advertisements. Over half of those ads stress the importance of being beautiful and thin. Rather than throw our arms up in dismay or despair, we can join our daughters and become detectives together in exposing the saboteurs of a healthy body image, while highlighting what a body is for — to enable our daughters to be real girls in the real world.
Watch movies and music videos together. Discuss what you enjoyed, felt uncomfortable with, disliked and would have done differently if you had been the producer. How many different body sizes were represented? If larger girls are in the movie or video, what role do they play? How representative of real life is the movie or video? Remember that the goal is not to like the same things and be in complete agreement, but to engage together in finding what is good in the culture and sharpening skills for discerning what could sabotage a healthy body image.
If possible, get some movies that were popular when you were a teenager. Watch these together, noting the styles, trends and messages of the time. What has changed since then? How have these changes influenced our ideas about the perfect body?
Normalcy is what is often lost in advertising. Together, choose and tear out advertisements depicting thin supermodels. Talk about how these images don’t look like real girls in a real world.
When your daughter does find a television program she likes to watch, take the time to watch it with her often. Encourage questions. Ask her what she likes and dislikes. What sizes are the girls/women in the program? How do they honor or dishonor their bodies? Are their bodies for living in, or just for show? Begin to view commercials together critically. Watch them with your daughter and discuss the messages about body image. As you partner with your daughter in looking at the culture, you can encourage her to befriend her body, live in her body and relish being a real girl with a real life!
Taken from Mom, I Feel Fat! Becoming Your Daughter’s Ally in Developing a Healthy Body Image, by Sharon A. Hersh, Colorado Springs: Shaw Books, 2001.
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