How your family shapes your body image
Comments about our looks from our loved ones and friends can cause lifelong insecurities.
Picture the scene: a little girl tries on a sparkly dress, does a twirl and with great satisfaction, smooths it down. The adults around her echo her delight, and tell her how pretty she is. Later she looks at her favourite books, and sees slim people and slender animals going on exciting adventures, while their heavier counterparts are portrayed as slow or clumsy. Sometimes, she notices her own parents fretting about their weight or looks.
By the time she is a teen, her parents may worry how social media influencers are affecting her body image. But research suggests that in reality, her perception of bodies and their social acceptance will have been shaped long before then, in those very early years.
When we think about our relationship with our bodies, it's often hard to pinpoint precisely where our satisfaction or dissatisfaction comes from. If we cast our minds back to our childhood, however, we may remember a collection of off-hand comments or observations. None of them may seem hugely impactful in themselves. And yet, their cumulative effect can be surprisingly potent.
The writer Glennon Doyle still recalls how her looks as a child earned her praise from the adults around her: "I could see it on their faces… They would light up, and so I learned, this is a currency," she says on her podcast. But when she grew older and was considered less pretty, that adoration stopped – it was, she says, as if the world had turned away from her.
Whether it comes in the form of compliments or criticism, that kind of attention to body shapes can lay down beliefs and insecurities that are hard to shake off. The consequences can be tremendously damaging, as research shows, with family attitudes and derogatory comments about weight linked to mental health problems and eating disorders. In addition, the broader stigmatisation of overweight children has increased – affecting their self-esteem and of course, body image.
Given how early this awareness of body ideals begin, what can parents and caregivers do to help children feel confident about themselves – and more supportive of others?
Body shame is taught, not innate
Physical ideals hugely differ across time and different cultures – a quick look at any painting by Peter Paul Rubens, or indeed the 29,500-year-old figurine known as the "Venus of Willendorf", shows just how exuberantly humans have embraced curvy features. But today, despite a growing body positivity movement that celebrates all shapes and sizes, the idea that a thin body is an ideal one remains dominant on social media, on traditional media, on television, on the big screen and in advertising.
Awareness of body ideals starts early, and reflects children's experience of the world around them. In one study, children aged three to five were asked to choose a figure from a range of thin to large sizes, to represent a child with positive or negative characteristics. They were for example asked which children would be mean or kind, who would be teased by others and whom they would invite to the birthday. The children tended to choose the bigger figures to represent the negative characteristics.
Crucially, this bias was influenced by others: for example, their own mothers' attitudes and beliefs about body shapes affected the outcome. Also, the older children displayed a stronger bias than the younger ones, which again indicates that it was learned, not innate. The findings "suggest children's social environments are important in the development of negative and positive weight attitudes", the researchers conclude.
"We see the patterns whereby children are attributing the positive characteristics to the thinner figures, and negative characteristics to the larger figures," says Sian McLean, a psychology lecturer at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, who specialises in body dissatisfaction. "They're developing that quite early, which is a concern because they potentially have the chance to internalise that perception, that being larger is undesirable and being thinner is desirable and associated with social rewards."
While parents play an important role in shaping their children's attitudes and views, it should be emphasised that they are far from the only influence youngsters are exposed to, and can often have a positive effect that can counteract messages from other sources. But the research shows that parents' views do matter.
Another study showed that children as young as three were influenced by their parents' attitude towards weight. Over time, the children's negative associations with large bodies, and awareness of how to lose weight, increased. There is often a gender element to these perceptions, with sons more affected by their fathers' views, and daughters by their mothers' attitudes. The use of dieting to control weight has even been reported in girls as young as five. Here the main factors were exposure to media, as well as conversations about appearance.
The studies show just how early young children take on the societal perceptions of those around them, paying close attention to how adults behave and talk about bodies and food. That pattern continues, and can even worsen, as they grow older. Research assessing the level of body dissatisfaction and dieting awareness in children aged five to eight found that "the desire for thinness emerges in girls at around age six". From that age, girls rated their ideal figure as significantly thinner than their current figure. Again, the children's perception of their mothers' body dissatisfaction predicted whether the girls then also felt dissatisfied with their own bodies. "A substantial proportion of young children have internalised societal beliefs concerning the ideal body shape and are well aware of dieting as a means for achieving this ideal," the authors concluded.
Read the full piece on BBC Future here
—
My book The Motherhood Complex is out now.
It’s available on Hive, Waterstones, Foyles or Amazon and all other stores. It’s also on e-book and audiobook. Read it? I would love to know what you think, or even better, leave me an Amazon review (you can do this regardless of where it was bought)- this really helps first time authors like me. Not in the UK? Free shipping abroad here.
Questions or comments? You can reply to this post or I’m on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.