Talking about bodies doesn’t have to be toxic
It can be hard to escape headlines about celebrities’ bodies and weight. Here’s how to talk about body image with kids.
We’re once again in a cycle of headlines that feels acutely focused on celebrity and weight and eating disorders. And unfortunately there will likely be more tomorrow and the next day and on and on.
It can be overwhelming, especially if you’re still feeling the effects of the extreme thinness culture that dominated the 1980s through the early aughts — the supermodels and Snackwells and celebrities’ bodies being dissected in the media. And now, many of us are also parenting or playing important roles in the lives of school-aged children and trying to help them have healthy relationships with their own bodies.
So I called up some experts to get advice on how to help the younger people in our lives process what they’re seeing and hearing about bodies, and the size of those bodies, right now.
Tip #1: Heal yourself first
Charlotte Markey, PhD, a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University who specializes in social influences on eating-related behaviors, said the struggle that moms in particular face as they navigate talking to their children about food and body image is very real, very common — and also very much worth talking about.
“I talk to moms a lot and everyone’s like, ‘Ah but I haven’t even healed myself. What do I do?,’” said Markey, who is also the author of “The Body Image Book for Girls.” The reality though, is that it’s never too late.
“You can still seek professional help. You don’t have to have an eating disorder,” she said. That might be a therapist, that might be a dietitian, that might even mean asking your primary care physician for a referral for a good place to start. “You can go out and get the support that you deserve because most of us were tormented by the last generation on this.”
Tip #2: Understand boomer culture — and boundaries
Jessica Wilson, a clinical dietician whose work focuses on structural inequalities and marginalized communities, said that a lot of the issues that middle-aged parents face when it comes to food and body image are rooted in the messages they received about their own bodies from their parents.
A lot of this has to do, Wilson said, with the culture that baby boomers were raised in, one that prioritized absolute trust in systems and doctors. Those doctors not only routinely weighed their patients and discussed their weights with them, but moralized around weight — and made correlations between weight and health — that have since been undone in the ensuing decades.
“That impacted our parents. They passed that on to us,” Wilson said.
It created a culture where it became incredibly normal for parents to talk to their children about their weight and compliment and reward thinness. Now, these children are adults — and many of us are still listening to the older generation talk about our bodies, now in front of our kids. (Did your aunt comment on your weight last Thanksgiving? Then you know this dynamic well.)
When Wilson is working with children with eating disorders, she asks their parents to set strong boundaries with their children’s grandparents. She tells them to explicitly ban talking about body size or weight in front of the kids — and impose consequences, like leaving a visit, if they violate that boundary.
Tip #3: Make diversity a core value
Wilson emphasized that we know how much kids make assumptions about people based on what they look like: Just as prejudice can exist with racial differences, so can it exist with body size differences, Wilson said.
“Even if we’re not saying things out loud, our children are picking up on our perceptions of body size,” she said.
You can begin to undo this by making diversity a core value of your parenting — and having age-appropriate conversations with children about the ways people are treated differently based on how they look.
“So many bodies are policed in so many different ways, so having body size included in those conversations that we’re already having about how some people are mistreated in society — including because of their body size — can be really helpful and normalize talking about it,” Wilson said.
Tip #4: Normalize that bodies can and should change
Markey said another really important lesson is that bodies change, and that’s normal.
More and more parents are normalizing explaining to their children in plain language the way their bodies will change during puberty; this is a perfect opportunity to also lay the groundwork for a lifetime of change, Markey said.
“Accepting change as the normal, appropriate response to life events and aging” is a lesson we can teach young people — and ourselves, she said. As we continue to move through midlife and beyond, it’s an essential body image lesson for us to take to heart, too.
“Everyone wants to try to get back to, like, their 14-year-old body, which is not realistic,” Markey said. “So talking about body diversity and body change is really, really valuable.”
Tip #5: Don’t moralize around food
Food is both “more important and less important” than most people think it is, Markey said.
“We just want to talk about food as being important for nourishing ourselves and for being fun and enjoyable,” Markey said. “I use the language of ‘food is just one way we take care of ourselves,’ like brushing your teeth is taking care of yourself, eating a variety of different foods also helps you take care of yourself.”
Wilson said that explaining that, for example, protein builds muscle and carbohydrates and fats give us energy can help us understand why all different kinds of foods are useful to our bodies in different ways.
“In the framing of food neutrality, not actively restricting your child from eating a certain type of food will then lead to the child deciding if they want to eat it or not,” Wilson said. “Rather than us telling a kid, ‘If you only eat cake for lunch, you’re gonna feel bad later,’ let them figure that out for themselves.”
Tip #6: Swap generic statements for genuine questions
If we hear a kid make a comment about their own bodies, our instinct might be to quickly tell them that they are perfect and beautiful. But Markey said that doesn’t actually accomplish much. “Kids don’t believe parents when they say that, so it’s not really that useful.”
Instead, she said, she encourages adults to instead ask simple and open-ended questions.
“It’s really important to ask, ‘Why are you saying that? What’s going on? Did something happen?’ because a lot of times — almost always if a young, pre-puberty kid, is expressing concern — someone said something and it might not even have been directed at them,” Markey said.
You can point out the way your own body might be similar to their own changing body, and to acknowledge that no matter our shape, our job is to take care of ourselves. For example, if a kid says they wish they had smaller thighs like a certain celebrity, you can make a comparison with your own body.
“I think it’s OK to just say, ‘I have thighs that are a bigger size too,’” said Markey. Then you can explain how your own body helps you live the life you want. In this case, you could respond, “My thighs are really muscular. They’ve helped me run a lot. Not everyone has the same-shaped legs and we don’t love every single aspect of ourselves always, but we still have to take care of ourselves.”
Validate that we may have a range of feelings about our bodies as they change — but pointing to the way that different bodies look different helps normalize our experiences.
Tip #7: No one’s perfect (not even — especially — you)
Markey also adds that for parents, it’s important to remember that sometimes, we’re going to miss the mark in talking to our kids about complicated things. If we catch ourselves making a comment that we wish we hadn’t about bodies — our own, a celebrity’s, anyone – we can acknowledge that.
You can always go back to your kid and ask for a redo. So often as adults, and especially as parents, we can be afraid to admit that we got things wrong — but there’s a really valuable lesson for children to be learned in watching us acknowledge a misstep and ask to go back and revisit a conversation.
“You can revisit it and you can try to make it better,” Markey said. “I think we have to give ourselves grace.”