Podcast Transcript

Episode 75: How to Help Your Daughter Build a Healthy Body Image – Starting at Age 3

[Bouncy theme music plays.]

Sam: Hey, I’m Sam.

Ashley: Hi, I’m Ashley, and you’re listening to All Bodies. All Foods. presented by The Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders. We want to create a space for all bodies to come together authentically and purposefully to discuss various areas that impact us on a cultural and relational level.

Sam: We believe that all bodies and all foods are welcome. We would love for you to join us on this journey. Let’s learn together.

Sam: I am so glad you pressed play. Today’s episode is one I truly wish every parent, caregiver, teacher, or really anyone who loves a child could hear. We’re diving into a conversation about how mothers and really all caring adults can begin helping daughters build a healthy body image as early as age three. Yes, three years old. And before you start wondering if that’s too young to talk about body image, you’re not alone. We asked that exact question in this episode. Now while the focus today is on girls and daughters, we want to say upfront, most of the tools and insights shared here can benefit any child. Body image concerns don’t discriminate, and the strategies we talk about are rooted in building self-esteem, resilience, and a positive relationship with the body. Skills that all children deserve to grow up with. This conversation is grounded in science.  It’s full of compassion and totally free of shame or blame.  Our guests today are researchers and authors who’ve spent years studying how body image is formed in early childhood, and more importantly, how we as adults can become powerful protective forces in our kids’ lives. We talk about body image as a multi-layered concept influenced by parents, media, and peers, and we don’t just scratch the surface. This episode is packed with practical tools you can use today.  Literally. You’ll walk away with things to say, to do, things you can model, and even ways to play with your child that can promote a more peaceful, confident relationship with the body. Whether it’s expanding a child’s categorical self, navigating princess culture and Barbie dolls, or encouraging joyful movement, we’ve got you covered. And we do all of this while holding a big truth. There’s no magic formula to prevent body image issues or eating disorders, but there are steps we can take to reduce risk. Prevention matters.  We know that body dissatisfaction and concerns about weight or shape are well-established risk factors and hallmark features of an eating disorder, which is why starting early with intention and love makes a real difference.  It was an absolute delight to speak with these authors. They brought both research and real humanity to this discussion. Their message is clear. No matter how old your daughter or your child is or how much you’ve worried that you may have gotten it wrong, you can begin to support their body image in positive ways today no matter how old they are. This is a no judgment zone filled with opportunity not perfection. A little about our guest today, the authors of Beyond Body Positive, a Mother’s Science-Based Guide for Helping Girls Build a Healthy Body Image. Dr. Ashleigh Gallagher, PhD is a social psychologist who enjoys taking psychological science outside the campus of academia, educating undergraduates for nearly two decades, most recently as a senior lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has also applied social science in her work as a researcher at the North Carolina court system. She is also the author of the book, The Portable PhD, Taking Your Psychology Career Beyond Academia.  And then there’s Dr. Janet Boseovski PhD. She’s a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She studies children’s social and cognitive development, and her research has been published in leading scientific journals. Janet is an associate editor of the academic journal Social Development and a board member of the Jean Piaget Society for the Study of Knowledge and Development and the Greensboro Science Center.  She enjoys speaking with parenting groups, teachers, and science educators about child development and writing about developmental science for the public. So mothers and parents out there, take a deep breath and get ready to feel both informed and empowered.  Here we go.

Hello, welcome back. You’re listening to All Bodies, All Foods. I’m Sam, and I’m here with Ashley. We are so thrilled today to have this conversation with authors of the book, Beyond Body Positive: A Mother’s Science-Based Guide for Helping Girls Build a Healthy Body Image.  Welcome to the show, Janet and Ashleigh.

Janet: Thank you.

Ashleigh: Thank you so much.

Sam: So we would love to learn more about you both, specifically what inspired you to write a book not only about body image, but this is really a book designed to help mothers raise their daughters in this culture that we know is obsessed with appearance, dieting, weight loss. What was the inspiration?

Ashleigh: Well, I’ll go first.  I had been trying to make some healthy behavior changes.  I was trying to get into a structured, committed exercise program because that was not something that I was doing previously. And about that time, my daughter was also seven or eight years old.  And I was thinking about some of the things that, some of thoughts and attitudes I had toward my own body, and I was wondering, because a lot of people say my daughter is my mini me or she looks just like me or whatever. So I was kind of wondering, you know, how will she view her body? Given that I feel the way I do about mine and we look so much alike. But Janet and I, in addition to being colleagues and collaborators or friends, and so we would talk about this stuff as women do and kind of merging our social psychology and developmental psychology perspectives, we kind of identified that there was a lot of science on this that wasn’t being  integrated  and wasn’t necessarily accessible to everyday moms. So we thought, somebody needs to write that book.  And as it turned out, we ended up just writing the book.

Janet: Just to add to that, you know, there’s a great literature on adult women and their body image struggles and lots of work on that. And there’s a whole separate literature on children, girls. And when you start to look at those literatures, you see that those things are intertwined and that if we want to build healthy body image, moms are super important and starting early is super important. And so we got really inspired to say, we want to share all this in a way that’s accessible, that provides tips for moms.

Sam: That’s great. This is so needed.  Oftentimes girls are called the mini-me of their moms. I don’t know. Do you experience that, Ashley? I know Ashley has a three-year-old.

Ashley: Yeah, I was going to tell you guys at some point, because I probably would talk about her too, but bringing in my three-year-old, yeah, I experienced that a lot in personality.  Which is really fun. But I’m super excited to have this conversation too, because again,  I’m a mom of a three-year-old girl.  And so this feels like a very real space for me, to be quite honest. 

Sam: Absolutely. I was thinking to myself, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time in my career focusing on helping adolescent girls. You know, at Renfrew, take, at our residential center, take ages 14 and up.  So a lot of my focus has been on teenage girls, young adults, and even older adults. And this is really fascinating to me, the thought that we can start as early as three.  I mean, I was really shocked to read that. I know we’ll dive into that. But, yeah, the idea of like starting so early, you know, the hope that maybe we can prevent body image issues, eating disorders. I’m really thinking this conversation can give hope to a lot of people out there trying to help their kids.

Ashleigh: I think so, definitely. And that was one of the things that occurred to Janet and I and our, and our discussions kind of leading up to all of this is, you know, the, the women who are grappling with these issues today were once girls and then they were once adolescents, and nobody was just sort of viewing this as a lifespan problem. In fact, it begins developing in early childhood and women are going to deal with body image issues, concerns, dissatisfaction, whatever throughout the entire lifespan. I mean, the data suggests that even in their seventies, you know, women are really concerned with aspects of their appearance.

Sam: Right. It’s not something where you wake up one day and you hit an age where you’re like, okay, I feel pretty good about my body. And it makes sense because we’re just bombarded with these messages of what we should look like, what we should weigh, what beauty is. And it makes sense that it affects every age at every developmental stage.

Janet: Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, people are surprised at what would you tell a three-year-old or what does a three-year-old know about their body, right? Because we do tend to think of it as a tween or a teen problem. And yet, you look at what the culture is doing, and we look at what body image lives, it’s part of your self-concept, and that’s your ideas that you have about yourself that start to develop very early as a preschooler and your inner culture that is emphasizing diets and appearance from the get-go, as you’re saying you’re pummeled with it. And so, you know, children who are three years old, they know thin and fat.  Children who are preschoolers already show weight bias, in some cases, body dissatisfaction, right? And so that to us indicates, well, we need to go in and do preventive work here so that that doesn’t become crystallized. And sure, we can always intervene. It’s always useful to intervene whenever we can, right? But certainly taking a more preventive approach and giving girls tools to deal with the culture because the culture is not going to go away, but we can army with tools. We can make you more resilient to what that culture is going to be doing to you. Yeah.

Sam: Awesome. Yes, that’s what we’re hoping. This episode will provide listeners with tools, tips, strategies they can use literally today or sometime this week. They can make a plan to try out some of this stuff with their daughters. 

Ashley: You all, I was wondering if we could  just kind of start at the basics or the starting point here with understanding your concept of body image and talking maybe about the three major influences that forms or shapes  or helps construct a child body image. 

Ashleigh: Thomas Gatton is, you know, luminary of the field of body image science, wrote that body image is a multi-dimensional concept. That is not how it is  kind of thought of in popular culture.  In popular culture, it’s reduced to a meme basically. Love yourself, for example. But it really includes several parts.  How we assess our features, our body’s features, like its size or its shape.  How we feel about its size or its shape, positive or negative evaluations or neutral. And then how invested are we in these evaluations of our body as a part of our broader self-image.  So Janet said earlier, you know, and I think this gets lost in the conversation too, body image isn’t this, you know, lone floating thing that we carry around in our minds.  It’s a part of our self-concept and how much of a part of our self-concept it is, is actually something that we can become intentional about. We can say,  you know what, this is taking up a lot of space in my self-concept, but it’s not actually who I am.  Who I am is my personality, my accomplishments, my strengths, my sense of humor, et cetera.  We could go on and on about women all day long. They’re fabulous.  And you get a sense for this when you look at a little girl you love. You don’t really think about her in terms of her appearance. When you think about her spunk or her humor, her sassiness, whatever it is, or how loving she is. You don’t think about her primarily in terms of her body.  So we just really don’t want women and girls to be doing that when they have control over how much space this takes up in their minds. So we know that it’s a multi-dimensional concept, and it’s influenced by three primary influences developing and growing up. One is parents and for young girls that will primarily be mom since she is looking to model and emulate many of the behaviors that she sees in her mom. And in addition to parents, we also have peers. We get plenty of information about our bodies and how they should look or what ours look like relative to others from looking around at our peers.  And in this social media age, that’s not only limited to who we’re going to school with, right? It’s also who we are friends with online. But then media is the third primary influencer.  And again, there’s a lot made of social media these days, but it includes all forms of media.  And back in the day, we were reading our magazines, our fashion magazines and following all the models back in the ‘90s and how thin they were. So media has been around ever since, you know, the early 1900s with the Sears and Roebuck catalog,  where it told us what you should look like in this outfit. So media, peers, and parents are the three primary influencers. Yeah.

Ashley: I was just telling Sam before you all came on,  just telling her a story about my daughter.  So she is tall for her age and often gets mistaken for being older.  And I went somewhere with a friend yesterday and who also has a three-year-old  and the conversation about, my goodness, she’s so tall, she’s so tall, she’s so tall, just kept coming up.  But it wasn’t just the phrase, she’s so tall. It was like, she’s so big, she’s so much bigger. I can’t believe how big she is. And I found myself stuck at some point because I wanted to be like, can we move on from this conversation? Can we, you know, and I just, it has me thinking about how probably common it is or quote normal. You talk about with babies, like their size differences or just any sort of differences. It’s like, well, this baby can do this and this baby can do this and my baby has always been long and tall for whatever reason.  Genetics are funny. And that has always been a conversation that,  you know, at times we’ve talked about and also other people comment on constantly.  I guess I’m saying like, it feels like there’s maybe this shift from when it’s okay and maybe it’s not ever okay, but there does seem to be this shift when they’re super, super young of like people just commenting constantly  versus now, you know, you all mentioned being three, she is three and she is hearing stuff now. And it is like, you know, my husband and I have talked about this and talked about how we want to create a very safe and fun and welcoming and, you know, free space for her and how we don’t want to use certain languages. But I don’t know. I’m just, I’m so thankful for your book. Because I would even love to learn tools, you know, and how do I navigate this very real experience that  I literally had yesterday, you know?

Sam: Right, right.

Janet: Yeah, and I think, you know, because there are people out there that seem to think that this is some vapid, you know, women complaining about their body sort of problem. It’s like, let’s just step back and consider how important body image is, right? And so when we consider these comments are not just comments that we should brush off our shoulders. They have meaning, they shape how we think about ourselves because yes, people are saying things that are causing us to think about those things, and we can incorporate those into our self-concept. So if I’m a very young girl and I’m constantly hearing about my appearance and especially if I feel like there’s some evaluative judgment coming along with that rather than it being an observation, well, there you are affecting her self-concept. So it ought to be taken seriously and, you know, we control what our children ingest. We don’t let them eat garbage off the ground, right? So when people make these kinds of comments, I think we do have to, to some degree, you know, be the person that is the protector until girls are old enough to sort of have the tools themselves. And, you know, that’s awkward because you don’t want to be confrontational with friends or family, but there are ways to say, you know, I noticed that you’re talking a lot about her height in front of her, whatever characteristic, and you can say, you know, I’m really trying to develop her awareness or her,  you know, her self-efficacy, her perceived capability about her jumping skills, or we’re talking a lot about numbers these days, and, man, could you help me out and talk to her about that? And so you’re just basically like channeling them for help rather than representing them about what they’re saying, understanding that they probably mean well, which, you know, I think people are just, they just think, oh, we’re just observing, but, you know, Ashleigh and I talked about this when people say stuff to girls like, you have your father’s  eyes or your mother’s legs. Like, what does that mean for them?  And especially if they’ve heard mom, especially say things about her legs, your daughter is hearing and seeing those kinds of behaviors about your own body. And then what is she to conclude when people say your body is like her body? Right. And so I think trying to, you know, get people on board as allies in a non-defensive way is helpful. And then when girls are a little bit older, having a conversation with them directly about people will make comments.  And in their families, maybe those are the kinds of things they do, and they’ll make those comments to you, and here’s a way that you can just say, you know, I like to talk about this instead, right?  And redirect the conversation yourself. It might take you a little while to develop that tool, but we encourage that because that gives the girl, the developing girl autonomy, right? Like actually I’m going to steer the conversation differently. I mean, how often have we as women been subjected to that where somebody singles you out with a physical appearance thing that you’re kind of like, hmm, I didn’t really want that to be singled out right now.  And maybe you haven’t even developed the tool to say, actually, I don’t talk about weight changes or I don’t talk about this or whatever it is. So we can actually arm you to expect it earlier and have a tool to deal with it earlier but also try to get folks around you to be allies in a way that’s just non-defensive and really giving people the benefit of the doubt and not assuming they’re trying to be hurtful. They probably, for the most part, just don’t know.  I do think with things like weight, it gets a little more sensitive, where I think being a little more firm is a good thing if someone is commenting on weight, saying, like, you know, in our family, it’s our policy really not to talk about bodies in that way, because that’s one that is more shown to be more potentially damaging  versus something like just a more surface kind of characteristic. But yes, I think, you know, you’re absolutely right. It’s smart to think about how do we protect and how do we also arm her so that she has the independence to deal with that herself as she gets older. Yeah. 

Sam: Mm-hmm.  So you’re saying that three-year-olds, I mean, this is really young and there are, there might be parents out there listening, thinking of themselves, oh, come on. You say a three-year-old’s tall. They’re not thinking about their body. They don’t really care, right?  And you’re saying that, three years old, that is a great time to start building positive body image  because there are things that they’re internalizing at that age. So what does the research say?  I mean, is three a little too young? Are we going to create body image issues that aren’t even there? You know, parents might be thinking like, shouldn’t we just leave well enough alone here?

Janet: Right.

Sam: So yeah, what’s the research say?

Janet: Yeah, it’s a fine line. You know, to be clear, we’re certainly not saying that any appearance comments are inappropriate. It is fine to tell a little girl she’s pretty.  It is fine to have occasional comments about physical appearance. But what we do know is the research shows that the self-concept is in fact developing early and that when there are evaluative statements about people, children are absorbing those statements. We know that they’re paying attention to good being associated with thin, right? And bad being associated with what they consider to be fat.  We know that those messages are there. We know that there’s some body dissatisfaction there. You know, it varies depending on obviously the age, the amount of exposure, the timing of exposure, so I don’t want to make generalizations for the research. But, you know, no one is saying that we’re going to sit them down and say, now I’m going to teach you about body.  What we are saying is we do that indirectly by creating a self-concept that isn’t so centered on physical appearance. Physical appearance is one part of you, but you’re three and we want to hear about your skills. We want to cultivate your talents. You know, we want to show you that there’s so much to you that this is one little piece. And so it’s not going to drive the bus and the cultural emphasis on dieting and what you’re supposed to look like, you’ll be protected from that because that’s not who you are. That’s this small little element to the side. And that is what you need to cultivate earlier, because if you’re already nine or 10 and so much of your self-concept is tied up in appearance and what you should look like and all of the shoulds as they offer so many women, right? Then we have a lot of undoing to do versus saying, let’s build this. And yeah, we’re not ignoring appearance. You know, it’s great to take some pride in your appearance. Absolutely. We all do. It’s natural. Ashleigh can tell you that as a social psychologist.  You know, we want to fit in with other people. We want to feel great about ourselves. Wonderful. But for women, that takes up too much of the piece of the pie. And we want to, you know, start early so that we don’t end up in that position.

Sam: This is such a great point because it’s really about laying the foundation.

Janet: Exactly.

Sam: Of a very complex identity, not so focused on body image, and why wait for, you know, when we talk about identity and psychology, to me, what comes to mind, I think of the teenager that’s searching for themselves, right? The 17, 18 year old who’s trying to figure out who they are. But really, your three-year-olds are trying to figure out who they are.  And that’s really the start of it. So why not start there? 

Ashleigh: And we know this about some other things like self-esteem, for example. I mean, we already work on that in elementary school. So it’s just kind of amazing.  So we work on other things that we are kind of laying the foundation for later on. And we don’t really expect, you know, problems with it now, but we are working preventatively to make sure that later on we optimize the chances that there aren’t issues with that thing. So, you know, it’s just like any of those other issues really. We start working on body image earlier than we thought, and we have to do less later on hopefully to make it healthier.

Ashley: Yeah. We had an episode, goodness, I cannot even remember when this was, what season it was. But one of the things that our guests recommended was to say about clothing instead of this doesn’t fit me anymore. This doesn’t work for my body anymore.

Sam: Oh, that was Zoe Bisbing.

Ashley: You remember that?

Sam: I remember her.

Ashley: Yes, this doesn’t work for my body anymore. We’re at the period of like, you know, toddlers grow so fast, babies grow so fast. And so I’m repurposing her clothes and giving them to other people, and she’s having feelings about that now because she’s aware of, you know, some of her favorite shirts and pants, and so having been able to use that language has felt like such a way to be preventative in this measure, I would say. And then we get to have fun things. And I’m just thinking about all the dress-up clothes that we have. It’s fun for them to play dress-up and imagine, and so having this fun concept of their bodies and of themselves, I think, is so important at this age as well.

Janet: Absolutely. And I, you know, we love that point because we also talk about this idea that people have for women that you reach some ideal and you stay there, right? Like your body is not supposed to change. Get your body back after a baby. Puberty hits and how do you avoid the weight gain? How do you avoid the freshman 15? You know, now you’re gaining menopausal pounds and we have all of the ads in saying, get your body back and get back into your high school jeans and no bodies change. They’re meant to change. Girls need to know that. We talk about this in our book as they’re approaching tweenhood, late childhood, arming them with this idea that your body will change and that’s expected and that is every bit normal and fine. And don’t let anybody make you feel like that’s something that’s, you know, strange or odd or something that has to be, quote, dealt with because you’re right.  It’s not a problem of you, right? That, oh the clothes, you know, I’m supposed to fit into the clothes. No, your body’s going to change. It’s going to change your life course for many different reasons, and it’s good that you know that in advance and that you’re not later feeling shame about whatever weight gain or body shape changes are going to occur, especially pre-puberty. But again, when we see it midlife with menopause, women are targeted now about, you know, the menopausal belly or whatever it is. There’s always some sort of improvement that you need to go back to some previous state. And we can say, actually, no, that’s actually not what bodies do for the most part.

Sam: I love that. It’s just not what bodies do, but we’re sold this idea that we should do everything we can to keep our body the same. And there’s lots of products to be sold to us if we buy into that for sure. Before we move on to the next question, I just want to take a moment to  kind of speak to the mothers out there that are listening that might be thinking to themselves, oh gosh, I haven’t done any of this.  And I’m one of the three factors that’s going to influence my kid’s body image. What do you want to say to those moms out there that might be like blaming themselves for their daughters having, you know, maybe not the best body image?

Ashleigh: Well, first of all, we want you to remember that you are not the only factor. I mean, we did say there were three and peers and media that I mean, there’s a lot of those voices that your child’s going to hear. So it doesn’t hurt her body image development doesn’t rest on your shoulders alone. And, you know, the game with parenting is to just figure out pretty quickly that you’re going to do some things imperfectly, right? This is 365, 24/7, you’re on. And nobody is going to do everything right. And honestly, in writing the book, I had feelings like that. Oh my gosh, I’m saying that this is what science says that women should do. And I didn’t do this when my daughter was three and four, and I’ve lost that window, you know, but it is never too late to implement this stuff. I’ve had an older woman, she’s around 71, who I know, and she read the book and she said, you know, I don’t even have a young daughter anymore. She said, but I’ve learned so much good stuff in here that helps me, you know, feel more healthy about who I am and what my body looks like.  So number one, moms are not going to get it perfect and it’s okay to make mistakes and it’s okay to start implementing changes at any point during the lifespan, and even some positive changes are better than none. Trying to achieve perfection in this process and to raise the perfect girl with the perfect body image, I think we should just kind of relieve ourselves of that notion at the outset, because that’s not going to be possible. I mean, even despite all of our best attempts, at some point, the girl is going to leave our house and our voices are going to kind of dim and recede into the background. And that’s as it should be. Her peers will be influencing her more at that point.  So no, this does not, it’s not all up to mom. It is not all her responsibility, and it is okay to do some things wrong and to just work on improving the way that you talk about yourself and you behave toward yourself around your daughter. Any of that will be helpful to her.

Janet: And I think too, it’s kind of vindicating for moms because we did focus groups  with moms and, you know, we talk about how successful women are and doing all the things they do day to day and here they are struggling with body image as adults and it’s moms themselves have been victims of the culture in that sense. So it is not all about blaming them. They have been, you know, socialized in this same way, so they’re going to hold these implicit beliefs about themselves, these ideas that they might not even realize they have. I think that is where the book is really helpful. We include a lot of self-reflection tools for you to think about like, oh, that’s the way I think this way about myself. And it removes the sort of self-blame that you have of why is this still a problem for me? Why is it a problem for you? Because culture has basically pummeled you with all of these messages. And now here you are as a grown woman trying to raise a child, and of course, those issues are going to come to the forefront. So we’re very sympathetic with, you know, with moms, it’s totally not about blaming you.  We say that, you know, it’s not your fault, certainly, but it is an opportunity. That’s how we see it, right? It’s your opportunity to do something for yourself, to introspect about, wait, like, let me confront some of these ideas I have and actually say, no, that’s not correct.  And then to assist with your daughter helping, you know, her develop the tools that she needs, but certainly recognizing that you’re coming from that place yourself and, you know, in all likelihood of the diet culture. It changes over time, but it’s always there, right? It was there in the previous generation and it goes forth now with social media and all these other new modalities where we get these messages.

Sam: Yes, these are such great reminders. So moms out there listening, it’s not all on you. Let’s leave the self-blame at the door, the perfectionism at the door, and let’s have a little self-compassion. 

Ashley: You also, in your book, you mention healthy body image building tools. And one that I would like to ask you to share more about is “expand her categorical self.” So I was curious if you could tell us a little bit more about this tool, how do we do it, why is it important? Go for it. 

Janet: Yeah, so that again brings us back to this self-concept idea where  you’re developing this vision of yourself, this understanding of who you are, what qualities you have, what you’re like, and a lot of that comes from the culture.  And children are super at categorizing. So if we think about the categorical self, it’s you’re putting yourself in categories. And the basic ones, if you just think of a child who’s four, she knows that she’s a girl, she knows that she’s four, she knows that she has brown eyes, for example, she knows that she loves to draw. So these are categories, right? What’s happening though is other categories are coming into play and many of those are gender-based. And many of those, that’s where sort of some of that danger lies, right? Because now we have this understanding of what it means to be feminine, what it means to be a girl, and although we’ve had made some important strides in that, there are still very gendered expectations, right, about what girls are supposed to be, how they’re supposed to look. So what we talk about when we say expanding the categorical self, it is, again, creating a lot of different categories based on her characteristics. So if she likes to, again, using the drawing example, you want to cultivate those skills. You want to have build self-efficacy or capability for her around those skills. You want to show her books of different kinds of art. You want to, if you’re going to use social media, show her, hey, look at these really cool artists and what they’re doing. So what you’re doing there is you’re cultivating those interests and you can do that with a number of categories.  And again, that is, that is self-protective because as you mentioned before, it creates something that is multifaceted, right? It’s you are many things you’d like to draw, maybe you’re on a certain team, you have all these different skills, you’re funny and you like jokes. And here we are creating these categories for you that again are protective because, okay, appearance is over here, that’s fine, it’s all well and good, but there’s so much more going on. And because children are such great categorizers, this is an ideal time to help them build those structures. And it’s pretty easy to do just by having everyday conversations about the stuff they’re getting into. And those things will change over time, and that’s totally fine as they figure out what they like and don’t like. Interest changes with children.  Love it one day, maybe not so much the next, but eventually stable things will emerge, and that’s what, again, is going to kind of protect them by building up multiple aspects of the self with appearance being  one  little component. Yeah.

Ashley: Yeah.  I love that.

Sam: Nurturing the parts of the self that are outside of body and appearance and expanding that pie chart of who you are. And we can do this as early as three and four?

Janet: Yes. And so that’s going to be more simplistic. You know, younger kids don’t really understand traits yet, but they understand behaviors. You like to do X versus you are this type of person. When they’re a little bit older, you get into more traits, right? And you can talk about the type of person they are, the kindness that they show in the behaviors that they do. But yes, it’s never too early and just quite like, you know, when we talk about child development, when we talk about the importance of just talking to your child, even when they don’t understand you, how important that is. Like talking to babies who don’t even understand the language yet is important. They’re getting intonation and tone and interests, they’re getting trust from you. So you can have very simple conversations. You might not even feel like you’re getting anywhere, but stuff is getting in there.  Yes, you will tailor that developmentally. We talked about that in the book. We have a little section in each chapter that is developmentally relevant about, you know, attention span of someone who’s four.  What did you want someone to six and how much time you can anticipate spending what the cognitive skills are, because that’s the other piece, right? Like, if you’re going to have impact, you need to take this developmental approach of what do kids actually understand? How long will they listen to me? Why are new things interesting and so on and so forth? And so we kind of pack that into the tips as well so that it’s not one big exercise in frustration. And this happens slowly, right? It’s like every little bit helps a little conversation in the car, right? Just those little moments that you have to talk to your child. It’s like, use those, absolutely. 

Sam: This doesn’t have to be complicated. You know, these can be really brief comments, conversations. Yeah. I have so many more questions and what’s coming up for me. I’m thinking to myself about, you know, my own body image and I had a lot of Barbies growing up. Like a lot. Like I had all the Barbies. And, you know, when my niece, my niece is a teenager now, but when she turned, I think she was four or five, I bought her some Barbies. And I’m thinking to myself, oh, my gosh, did I do something wrong? Did you know? Sometimes I wonder what is the impact of Barbie, dolls, toys, movies. I know like princess culture is huge right now. You think about all the Disney princesses and the movies that many young girls love. What does the research say about body image and dolls, toys, and princess movies? 

Janet: That is a big loaded question and an important question.  We will say one thing to note is there’s no one thing that’s going to contribute to a negative body image, so if you bought a Barbie for your daughter, like fear not, it’s okay.  If they don’t play, it’s perfectly fine, right? But that said, I mean, it’s a great question because there is evidence to suggest that if you’re playing a lot with these very gendered, idealized dolls, it makes you more interested in vanity and appearance play. Things like playing with makeup, playing with hair versus other modalities of play. There’s some evidence that in slightly older girls toward middle and late childhood, it’s associated with dietary restraint, so feeling like you have to control your food intake. There’s some evidence to suggest that it is related to body dissatisfaction, so feeling like there is something wrong with your body, you’re looking at this idealized doll. So we do have to be careful with this exposure, and really the recommendation is, you know, it’s not all bad. And I do want to make that point that, to be fair, in the past decade, and there’s research that bears this out, there’s more diversification of doll types. And especially where your minoritized, ethnic or racial minority, having dolls that portray your skin color, right, your racial heritage, that’s actually helpful for girls’ identities, so we don’t want to throw the whole thing out. It’s more that we want to limit it. We want to say, these are not the only toys you play with, right? So that’s number one is try to provide a host of opportunities for play and avoid stuff that’s fully, fully appearance emphasis, right, especially idealized appearance. That’s number one. Number two is to also look at the effects on the individual girl. For some girls, the play is just play, right? But is she commenting? Is she saying something about she doesn’t look like that or the doll is so skinny or the doll is so much prettier than she is, right? So if she’s internalizing, that’s maybe a warning sign for parents to minimize that in that girl. It may be fine for another girl, right? Even amongst siblings, you might see a difference, so paying attention also to your individual daughter and what she’s saying about those things is important. And then, you know, when they get a little bit older, introducing the whole media literacy bit. So when they’re young, it’s really the control is up to you to provide a host of toys. Some are going to be gendered, some will be Barbie, some will be princess, but we want more than that. We’re going to watch your reaction to that and have conversations with you if we feel like you’re somehow internalizing expectations based on that, and then when you start getting a little bit older,  you know, there’s ways to talk about just  literacy around toys, media, representation of girls and women, what’s real and what’s not real. But it’s a great question because that literature gets very complicated. It is overwhelming for parents like what you know, what toys do I choose? What do I do? It’s just a rubric to sort of, you know, give you a little bit of guidance like where you can have these things. It’s totally fine. You don’t want to ban them if she’s interested. It’s completely fine. But you want to have a diversification and you want to watch her reaction.

Sam: Yeah, that’s such a good point and a good reminder that, you know, every child is so different and we really do have to pay attention to how they’re interacting with these things.  Are they comparing themselves? Are we noticing some, I don’t know, just some self-esteem issues related to what they’re watching? For the parents out there who are thinking to themselves, when I take my kid to the toy store, they make a beeline to the dolls. Any guidance on how to expand their interests in toys and just how to nurture more variety, I guess?

Janet: Right. You know, that can be a tough battle and certainly you don’t want to say no because the resistance will probably be ever greater.  So it’s like, we’ll get the Barbie, but also how about we also choose something else. But you could also bring those things home spontaneously and ask them to consider playing with them. Having play groups, and we even suggest having play groups that aren’t gendered as in all boys or all girls can often be helpful, so there’s a mix of people and activities and toys. That’s also great. You know, having parents who model using a fun new toy or puzzle  is also great to say, at this really cool thing we can do. Let’s do it together to sort of cultivate interest. You may not win. You may not win that battle, right?  And that’s where more of the conversations will come into play. But really quite like with introducing them to food, it’s about trying to encourage the diversity. Is there going to be some gendered play? Absolutely. And it’s fine. And we’re certainly, again, not saying like don’t have a Barbie in your house. But yeah, just try to push the boundaries a little bit and see what you get. Yeah.

Sam: These are such great tips and tools. Thank you so much. I know there so many parents out there who are probably thinking, thank you for the concrete guidance. This is exactly what we need.

Ashley: One of my favorite ways to diversify play, I would say, is also reading.  We love reading, and when we’re in the car, one thing that we’ve done is give these, they’re like picture books, but they have the little flaps that you can pull up.  And that girl just does great in the car and she is just glued to those books. And it’s so cool because you can learn so many things, you know, that way as well. So, yeah, that’s so fun.  Well, you all, okay, so another question that I want to bring up is, well, and to, I guess, also talk about a lot of the patients that we treat in the work that we do with eating disorders, we navigate frequently uh appropriate movement or exercise.  And so I was curious if you all had guidance about what kind of language we could bring into the room with our children to talk about movement in a fun and helpful way and not have it be anything other than that. 

Janet: Yes, and that’s great. Researchers have recently brought attention to the idea that, you know, preschool age is a time to cultivate love of moving your body.  And it’s love of movement, right? It’s joy of movement. It’s play, essentially. And young kids typically enjoy moving their bodies until later when we tell them that you have to do this. In young kids, we want to just encourage how fun it is to move our bodies around. Our bodies are made to move. Let’s go to the playground, let’s have a YouTube dance party, right? Like there’s so many ways, again, you can do it simply. You can go across the street, you can go on the lawn, you can stay in the hall. It does not have to take up a bunch of time, but children do need to be moving. That’s an important message early on. And we want to develop that as a habit that they like. You know, the key in terms of not getting us into trouble developmentally is not attaching that to a, you know, the right to eat, right? So eventually what happens is there’s this connection with, you know, you’re allowed to eat as a woman.

Sam: It’s like the earning and burning mentality.

Janet: Yes, you do not need to earn food. And if anything, we want to teach our children the opposite. If we’re moving our bodies, we need energy. Let’s think about what foods will help us have energy so that you can jump as high as you want to jump or you can play that game. But in young ones, unstructured movement is best. I mean, you know, if you put them on a team, it’s just laughable and fun.  That’s also cool, right? Just unstructured, no rules. Let you move your body the way that you want. Let them be a little adventurous. We talk about that in the book. Like it can be kind of scary when you’re letting them go on the monkey bars and you’re like, uh-oh, face plant up ahead.  But you don’t want them to be fearful of movement, so you kind of have to, you know, hold your breath a little bit and let that happen. Making sure that they don’t associate exercise with self-improvement as they get older. That’s the other thing we’re taught, right? Like our bodies are these self-improvement projects and you’d better be ready to do these kinds of movements. So again, we don’t attach it to food. We don’t attach it to this idea that you have to improve anything. We attach it to, we appreciate our bodies. We want to cultivate what we call body respect and appreciation. We appreciate that our bodies can do all these great things and guess what? We have to take care of them, right? Just like we brush our teeth and do other things. We want to take care of our muscles, we want our muscles to grow, we want to eat properly. And so that’s where you can start to cultivate really health behaviors, independent of weight, independent of physical appearance, that shouldn’t enter into the equation, right? Eventually, again, the culture is going to hit them with that, but you’re already cultivating these other ideas around, you know, what it means to be a healthy person and what it means to have a healthy body image. I do want to note, you know, we talk in the book about aesthetic sports. That’s an arena where you have to be a little bit more careful. Aesthetic sports like ballet, example, gymnastics, nothing wrong with those, right? If a girl’s really interested in that, fantastic. You do want to though look at what is the school like? What are the teachers or coaches like to make sure that there isn’t that body talk that goes on in those sports? Because we do know those tend to be very appearance-bound. And so there you just want to talk about what is the philosophy of the school, if I’m going to allow my daughter to dance here, right? Making sure that it’s not geared toward, you know, talking about her round tummy as she’s practicing her plie, the kinds of comments, right, that teachers might make and hopefully are not making. But that’s an arena where you would want to do the legwork to say, okay, like, if we’re going to enroll you in this, let’s see what the philosophy of the school and the teachers is. Yeah.

Ashley: Such a helpful piece of advice there.

Sam: Oh, absolutely. Yes. And we talk a lot on this podcast about the risk factors for eating disorders, and sports, weight sensitive sports, sports with a lean aesthetic, it’s a risk factor. And it is, I love the framing of how important it is to do the legwork and make sure coaches are inclusive and aren’t body shaming, and it can make a big difference for a child who really enjoys that sort of activity. Oh, gosh, I have more questions. Where do we even begin? I feel like we can talk to you for hours and hours. So we talked about exercise. Can we move on from we talked a lot about three- and four-year-olds. What about children five to seven? You talk about this in your book. This is the point in childhood where children understand the meaning of the word diet. There was a study you referenced in your book. About 30% of five to seven-year-old girls said that they would hypothetically go  on a diet.  Ah, scary. Diets are the biggest risk factor for an eating disorder, by the way. You wrote that this is really good time for parents to implement what you call food parenting practices. What does this mean? How can we help our girls during this time?

Janet: Yeah, and that’s another area where we’re kind of missing education. We have physical literacy, then we also have food and nutritional literacy.  And you know, what does it mean to create a helpful environment? That’s really what we’re talking about. And it’s a good time to start this at that age range, because you start to see like more consistent eating patterns. I mean, kids are, you know, again, tastes are fickle. Love this meal one day, the next day, it’s the worst thing ever. For the most part, you start to see more consistency and more ability to sit at a dinner table, you know, engage in eating practices and you want routines around food and eating that are calm, that are positive, right? It’s not an anxiety provoking atmosphere. And again, this is not at all, you know, to blame mom or whoever’s sitting around the table, but your messages around the table are going to be heard. So if you’re saying something like, I shouldn’t be eating this too much, I can’t, right, or making comments about your body or even things that you’re not doing if you’re not eating. If you’re the mom who’s feeding everyone and you’re not eating, that’s encoded, right? If you’re showing that anxiety, then that’s being picked up upon. So trying to avoid that type of atmosphere is, and that is hard work, and again, that is not to blame moms. It gives moms an opportunity to think about, like, why am I doing this to myself too, right? Why am I punishing myself and saying I’m not allowed to have the pie that everybody else is?  You know, it also involves, you know, presenting a host or an array of foods, including fun foods, and letting it be, not moralizing foods, not creating an environment where something you’re constantly saying, don’t eat that, it’s bad for you, or it’s good for you, right? There’s times to eat certain kinds of food. That’s a good way to talk about it. Is this the right time to eat this kind of food? Maybe not. But you want to present a diversity of foods. You want to give children the autonomy to choose foods and not hover every minute about eat this, eat that, right? They actually are pretty good at self-regulating. If you look at young kids, they usually know pretty well when they’re full, they start to get messages that mess up their natural eating patterns because we’re the ones interfering, right, with those things.  And so we really want to emphasize just letting them take the lead sort of more intuitively, not moralizing food, trying to avoid good and bad. And also, you know, saying something like the food is healthy for you tends to backfire. It’s just that’s just not going to be the winner of the night. It’s more like would you consider having some of this? Try putting this food on your plate and leave it be and it will happen. You’ll model it but really it’s having calmness, consistency in the types of presentation of foods allowing for a host of you know a host of different foods and trying to avoid the, you know, the should’s and the don’t’s and those kinds of things. Monitoring yourself a little bit more around the table, which I recognize is difficult, but is an important thing to consider and to try. 

Ashley: We are running out of time, so I have another question for you, and I was hoping that maybe we could kind of end with this one. In the back of your book, there’s an appendix filled with wonderful ideas and activities that parents can engage in. So for the parents and the moms listening today, what would be something that they could start with this week, both with their child and with themselves?

Ashleigh: I think for moms, one of the most important things is to gain self-awareness about their attitudes toward their body and the behaviors that they do. This is not something most of us sit around thinking of very deeply, but researchers in psychology have actually developed questionnaires that you can take that will tell you about your perfectionism tendencies or your social comparison tendencies,  your neuroticism, for example.  And so one of the things we do in the book is offer moms the opportunity to take some of these self-assessments just to learn where they stand on these to become a little bit more self-aware.  We also offer for moms some guided reflection activities to do to kind of  think about, here’s where I am currently with my body image, here’s my goals for myself, here’s what I’d like to see for my daughter,  just becoming more intentional about approaching the whole process and doing it with, you know, like  science-informed strategies.  And then for daughters, we want to make it a little bit more fun than questionnaires, because they’re not going to sit around for that very long.  So we’ve come up with a number of activities and suggestions that are aimed at kids based on where they are in childhood. So the ones that we have for three-year-olds don’t look like the activities we have for 10-year-olds.  But I’ll just give you one example of an activity that we have for mom and  daughter to do together to go on some sort of  a nature walk or photography field trip and to make sure to keep the camera or the phone pointed outward. So the goal is to come out of that little trip there with no selfies and no poses, but to capture somehow still the fun that you had that day and the good feelings and memories that you created together  without making it need to be picture-worthy, Instagram-worthy, whatever it is that they say. So keeping the photography geared outward rather than inward, that’s one tangible activity we have.  But we have others for the littlest girls, we have some activities to kind of get them thinking about what their skills are, what are they really good at doing, and kind of making, we have them make a little crown that they’re the queen of doing these activities because they’re so awesome at them. So helping them come up with definitions for themselves that don’t involve their appearance.

Ashley:  I love that so much. We just went to the zoo yesterday.  So there were some outward facing pictures, but there were definitely some selfies that were taken.

Ashleigh: We want to be in the pictures too. So we shouldn’t banish ourselves from the pictures, but I was recently on a vacation and I was out on a boat and just had opportunity to observe a little girl. We’re on a boat outside of Maine and just looking at all of the spectacular scenery. And just like for 10 minutes, this girl is just taking selfies and posing for them. I just, I thought of all the natural awesome beauty that was just going right by as the selfies were being recorded. So it’s just, you know, not ruling anything out, but doing things in moderation and making sure that we’re broadening what kids might be doing if they’re left undirected.

Janet: Yeah. And a lot of the activities are quick and easy. We have lunchbox love notes, which is just writing something that you love about her and the things, the skills she had that she, when she, you know, is thinking about herself, she can refer to those. And again, that’s building up that self-concept in a way that you’re not referring to physical attributes, but all these amazing skills she shows, right, the amazing person that she is. And that takes you minutes to do. And so there’s lots of tips there, again, as Ashleigh was saying, that are developmentally relevant, that moms can implement pretty easily and they’ll find the ones that they like. And those are optional too, but I think that they’re fun and they really help build the skills. Yeah.

Ashleigh: Yeah. Most of all, we just really wanted to give moms tangible things that they could do instead of just giving them broad general advice, like do this. We wanted to say, here’s some ways that you can do this. This is what this might look like depending on what your child’s interested in. 

Sam: That’s really what I loved so much about your book is that it’s filled with research and includes so many real life doable activities and ideas that mothers can implement immediately. And I think it’s really empowering to read this book and feel like you have this whole toolbox of tools that you can use. So thank you so much for writing this. I can’t wait to share this with our audience. I hope they share it with mothers that they know. I hope that this spreads far and wide. But I know we’re just about out of time. If we could just pick one takeaway, a final word of wisdom for our listeners, or maybe a resource you’d like to share, what would you like our audience to leave with today?

Janet: I mean, I think you just said it, right? This is empowerment. It’s, you have the agency. You’re in the driver’s seat. And culture might try to lead you to believe otherwise, but you can actually say, no, this is how we do it.  Right? And I can be intentional about creating healthy body image for myself, improving my body image, and helping my daughter and other little girls that I love do that as well.

Ashleigh: And also that we’re not  the passive recipients of what culture is throwing at us. We really did want to empower moms with this book and you  are the first influencer in her life, so take that opportunity and use it wisely.

Ashley: Ashleigh, Janet, thank you so much. This was such a treat. And yeah, we just really appreciate it. And we want to say thank you again to our wonderful listeners. And we hope that you all enjoyed this. Thanks.

Ashley: Thank you for listening with us today on All Bodies. All Foods. presented by the Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders.

Sam: We’re looking forward to you joining us next time as we continue these conversations.

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