(submitted by the fantabulous Mir, of WouldaCouldaShoulda.com)
I am the proud mother to one perfect girl and one perfect boy. And by "perfect" you understand that I mean they are loved and cherished and generally more lovable than they are rotten. I am very fond of them, is my point.
They've been raised in the same home. They've been exposed to the same influences, held to the same standards, and praised and disciplined similarly. They even had similar builds for most of their childhood: Both of them rode the bottom of the weight curve in such a consistent manner that it became a running joke with the pediatrician that their favorite foods were air and water.
Now that they're a little older, that's changed, a bit. At 13, my daughter is in the middle of her final growth spurt, and she's tall and leaner than ever, angular and pointy in the way that adolescents often are. If she were ten years older, she'd look emaciated. Fortunately, youth makes it obviously that her physique is a product of rapid growth and not deprivation. Her younger brother, on the other hand, at 11 is firmly in the gain-a-little-weight-before-getting-tall phase, and for the first time in his life is actually an "average" weight. Although his sister is nearly a head taller, they're just pounds apart.
Kids—heck, adults—have their own personalities and foibles and proclivities no matter how they're raised, of course. I don't expect my children to be exactly alike because they're being raised in the same environment. And that's a good thing, because they're complete opposites in many ways. Still, on something as simple (ha!) as weight, I can't help feeling that this is a case of XY vs. XX. Or maybe just society's message to XY vs. XX.
My son, so far as I can tell, gives about 5 seconds of thought to his body each day, and that's usually in the form of "Look, I can make my belly button talk!" If he can smush together enough skin on his stomach to form a "mouth," he's delighted.
My daughter, on the other hand, is already convinced her body isn't good enough. I'll grant you that puberty is somewhat universally a time for self-loathing for any trivial reason, but I would almost understand if she had a specific complaint. (My favorite complaint at her age was that my hair was too frizzy, for example.) Some girls wish to be shorter or taller. But no, my daughter believes—I'm sure this is going to come as a huge shock to my fellow parents of teenage girls—that she's fat. Fat. She hasn't even made it to 90 pounds yet.
She'll squish the skin at the outer edge of her armpit and complain that it's fat. "That's not fat, that's skin," I say to her. She rolls her eyes. She complains that her thighs jiggle when she walks. "That's called being an object in motion," I offer, ever helpful. "And they're not jiggling at all. That's your skin stretching over the muscles that keep you from falling to the ground in a heap." She complains that I just don't understand.
The thing is… I don't. I keep my feelings about my own (aging, expanding) body to myself, for the most part. I never believed I was heavy when I was her age, because I was pretty clear that being able to trace my ribs and use my hipbones to cut things probably meant I was fairly slender. But it's almost as though she and her friends are just pre-programmed to believe they're fat—and said fat is terrible—no matter what. Fortunately, my daughter doesn't talk about dieting or restrict her food intake at all; I'm not worried she's altering her behavior based on her erroneous perception. But it still really bothers me that anything that isn't Photoshop-perfect falls short, in her eyes.
Real people have skin, and most of us even have fat. If she's convinced that any piece of flesh that isn't stretched tighter than a drum at all times is fat, now, what's going to happen to her (and her self-esteem) someday when she's not the stick figure she is today?
I just want to feed her a plate of cookies and teach her how to make a mouth with her belly button. Too bad she doesn't have enough skin to make a good one. (Please note that I fed her cookies, anyway. It's a start.)
How do we keep our girls from buying into this crap? Why are our boys immune but our girls so vulnerable?
(Read more @Mir @wouldashoulda.com)
–anything that isn’t Photoshop-perfect falls short, in her eyes
I started to laugh at that only because I have the Photoshop Disasters site in my reader. It is true tho, the industry generally paints such an unrealistic picture of what real women look like. Some how it has even gotten to my seven year old son who says he is fat. I swear that isn’t an ounce of fat on that boy. I’m not sure he could make his bellybutton talk, but he will puff out his tummy and declare himself fat.
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Oy. Hopefully he can get it out of his system before puberty…?
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My daughter weighed 2 pounds at birth and at 13 was built almost exactly like Chickadee, and also thought she was fat. I showed her all the instances I could find of before/after photos of retouched models and actresses. She’s now a portrait photographer who is great with Lightroom and Photoshop herself, so she gets that no one is perfect and it’s all smoke and pixels.
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Your daughter is beautiful, inside and out.
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Boys do this too, but in a different way (usually). I teach middle school and it is so painful to watch so many of these kids (girls and boys) go through a phase of physical self-loathing. I think the best we can do is teach them about what a healthy body is and hope that it sinks in.
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This makes me sad. I wish there was a foolproof way to get them through it with a minimum of angst!
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My take is that this is what Chickadee and her friends do when they are together; they measure, they evaluate, they compare (not so different from boys, eh?). And then when she gets home, she does a reality check with you. You are giving her the correct measurement tools, and she needs to hear that voice in her head when the other young women are spouting nonsense. Remind her that if she really needs to compare, to look at the real and admirable women in her life and see the whole of a person as the standard of beauty.
Honestly, I don’t think boys are immune, they are just not inclined to discuss it openly…with their mothers.
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Well I think my son is probably immune, but he’s perhaps not the norm.
Excellent point, regardless.
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Well, as an active anorexic for six years (8th through 1st year of college) I think it’s important to note that some of the dissatisfaction with bodies comes not from an externally imposed ‘ideal beauty,’ but from a complex reaction to a rapidly changing self, and that this includes a deep desire to maintain control over something.
As tweenie/teens girls are having to come to terms with a new body, a new role, a new world – including the terrifying one of incipient sexuality. No one fits into this new role easily – how can we? So we latch onto the most obvious thing, the thing we can compare the most easily: our physicality. We can’t see the emotional state of someone else, but we can certainly see how big their boobs are. So, at least for a while, that becomes the benchmark, the easily quantified model of ‘how I am meant to be.’
I do think it’s inevitable, just as it’s inevitable that the same age group will dress in ways that they are utterly convinced are the coolest ever and which, five years later, will either humiliate or amuse them no end. I do NOT think that eating disorders are inevitable, nor do I think that permanent damage is inevitable either.
Oh, and I agree with The Other Leanne that boys have similar experiences – my lean and lanky son (6′ tall, 135 lb soaking wet, six pack to die for but not an extra ounce anywhere on his frame) is reasonably cheerful now about the fact that his body type simply doesn’t build bulky muscles, but it didn’t make locker rooms in high school any easier.
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These are excellent points, Megan. Thank you.
I do make a point of both commenting on anyone I want to feed a sandwich to (letting her know that when someone is super skinny, I and many others may find that concerning rather than attractive) and complimenting and discussing all sorts of different-looking people. (I was very pleased, recently, when I commented that one of her friends “seems big compared to the rest of you” and immediately wished I had bitten my tongue, but when I rushed to clarify that she’s not heavy, my daughter rejoined with, “No, I know what you mean, she’s just a different body type.” I managed to extract my foot from my mouth and agreed, commenting that she’s awfully pretty, and silently glad that at least on SOME level she’s getting it.)
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I come from a long line of short, fat women. My husband’s sister and mother (who was adopted, so it’s a short line, but who knows?) are both short and fat. I am short and fat and likely, so will my daughter be, someday.
In our house, ‘healthy’ is a set of behaviors. It is *not* the way one’s body looks. It has to be, or I’m setting us up for abject failure. If I gave up on eating well and exercising regularly just because my waist-to-hip ratio remains stubbornly close to 1 … well, *that* would be bad for my health.
Maybe instead of arguing about whether she’s ‘fat’ or not, you could point out that it’s sort of beside the point. Can she do the things she wants to with her body? What are the things she can do that she is proud of? Is she strong, and capable? Musically talented? Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound? *Those* are the things to learn to love, because the body itself is going to change over time and it’s likely to get farther and farther away from society’s idea of perfection.
That’s what I try to teach my daughter (and son) anyway. 30 years of dieting has taught me (finally — apparently, I am a slow learner) that I can *never* be thin-by-society’s-standard and that only if I allow it to be the primary/only focus (read: 1-2 hours per day in the gym, calorie intake limited to 1200-1400 per day) in my life can I even be not-fat. I wish I could have back all the energy I wasted hating myself for that.
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yes, yes, yes. will you be our mom?
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Didn’t you just go on a cabbage soup diet? And you don’t think your super-smart kid picks up on any of your attitudes about your own body?
I don’t think you can stop your teenage daughter from hating her body- it happens to all of us- and you’re right that what she does with those thoughts, how pervasive and important they are in her life, and how long they last, matters more. I’m not saying it’s all about you, either, but mothers model attitudes and behaviors, and it seems like you’ve given her some recent evidence that you value weighing less more than meeting your nutritional needs in a healthy way, even if it’s only for a short period of time.
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Kelly, when my daughter got home this evening I told her I wanted to talk to her. I explained that I’d written this post today and that a reader was deeply concerned that by having done a silly diet for a week at age 39 I had conveyed to her that I value being skinny over good health. “I’m just checking to see if the 5% of our lives I’ve shared on the Internet has given this woman an accurate picture of what’s happening here, because she seemed pretty upset,” I told her.
She thought about it a few seconds, then said, “Well, I do feel like it was pretty damaging. It totally overrode the rest of my life and how you’re always cooking us healthy meals and stuff. In fact, I think that you, and me, and that woman from the Internet should all sit down together and discuss it until I feel better. Which will probably be never. I might even cry about it right now.”
Granted, she’s kind of a wiseass. (No idea where she gets that from.)
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Please don’t go the other way either. I spent most of my young teen years getting grief because I was underweight. 5’7″ and 90lbs underweight. I ate everything and I was fairly active but I had no curves and apparently just had a very active metabolism.
Flash forward to my 40′s and I’d kill for the metabolism of those years but not to live them again. The funny part is that when I gained a few pounds and switched to a “low fat” diet to lose them is when I really started gaining weight. Turns out I really should be an Atkins girl and my natural inclination towards vegetables and meat was perfect for me. Unfortunately I’ve developed a taste for sugar and tasty carbs.
Making any judgement on people’s body type and presuming they either eat or don’t eat knowing only how they look right now is counterproductive.
All THAT said you’re doing an awesome job with Chicky and she is probably just sanity checking what her friends are saying with you. It’s lovely that you have that trusting relationship.
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“Making any judgement on people’s body type and presuming they either eat or don’t eat knowing only how they look right now is counterproductive.”
Great point.
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I’m sure Chickie is just being a normal teenager. I had and still have body dysmorphia to an extent.
I am genetically disposed to gaining weight. All through high school and college I was convinced I was fat, that my thighs and butt were huge. Then I got a job in an office. The combination of stress and lack of exercise caused me to balloon up. Thing is, I didn’t notice. People actually had to tell me that I had gotten fat. It came as a bit of a shock because I didn’t understand why they were saying it now. My physical shape had finally reached the shape I thought I was anyway. I was unhappy with it, but it wasn’t different than before.
Then I looked at some photographs. I realized that I used to have a perfect figure when I was obsessing over it. I really, deeply wish I could’ve seen it back then and there. I spent the years I was best looking, loathing how I look.
I’m doing my best to get in shape now. Exercise, food, etc. I’ve lost most of the weight from when I had gotten fat, if not all.
When I look at myself in the mirror, it depends. Some days I will be feeling great, I will glance at my full-body reflection in a shop window and think I look sexy, thin. Other days, I will only notice the flaws, and they will gang up on me until I have to look away.
I used to look at documentaries about anorexia, wondering how those girls can draw themselves fat when they are skeleton and skin. Then it hit me, and I know exactly how. Self-perception is dangerously subjective. The mirror might not lie, but our eyes do.
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You know, you said some of the key words in your post. “Rapid growth.” I’m thin and was built like Chickadee as a teen. I remained built that way until my first pregnancy at which time I felt like a blimp. Mind you, I only put on 35 lbs and had a 10 lb baby. But the change was so rapid that I was horribly self-conscious of my body. I wore tents the whole time. I couldn’t look in the full length mirror without seeing “fat.” (And suddenly huge boobs which drew attention I didn’t want.)
I think teens are just trying to adapt to rapid change. Assuming Chickadee is starting to get some curves to her body, it IS dramatically different than her little girl body. The vocabulary needs some refining, but if she’s using the terms of her peers without truly being critical of herself or changing her eating habits, I suspect she’s falling into the norm. Boys get in a weight lifting mode at that age, trying to add their own curves to their bodies. I don’t think it (generally) is more than a way to adjust to rapid change.
Start using the term “womanly” to refer to your own extra 5 lbs and her new curves. Maybe that’ll be more inspiring.
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My daughter, at nine, thinks she’s too skinny. To be frank, she’s got a big build and maybe a bit on the chunky side!
Something came up when we were with her grandpa, and he, unknowing to her real concern, told her that she was quite skinny and had nothing to worry about. *sigh*
And yeah, I didn’t worry about body image much as a teen, either. Too many other issues.
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I never gave a thought to my boyish frame up until I was 14 and then got hips and boobs but at 5’8″ was still only 95 lbs. I gave thought to the boobs and hips of course, but I never thought about being skinny, not the way I think about being 30lbs overweight in my 40′s anyway!
I would say it is just adolescent thinking and perhaps some parroting of the hive…Chickie seems very grounded and mature in most ways and I wouldn’t worry about her yet.
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has she seen retouched and unretouched Photoshopped models? I’m pretty savvy to this stuff and it was still shocking to me.
I have to agree with My Kids Mom about rapid growth – I had a period of rapid weight change about 2 years ago and it took me over a year to feel comfortable in my own body again.
I don’t have much control over my weight because of the meds I’m on, so I focus on being strong instead. It feels really good to be able to swim a little bit farther, to need to use heavier weights, to be able to see muscles in my arms. I am competing with myself now, not with anyone else.
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Exercising may help. I know a lot of skinny girls who complained they were fat when in fact they needed more muscles so that their skin wouldn’t be lose around her armpits or legs.
When we started exercising together, they gained weight (in muscle, not fat) and felt much happier about their bodies, stopping the complain. The type of (moderate) exercise that helped was using your own body as a weight, like here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodyweight_exercise
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The other night we were walking towards our 5 yo daughter’s room when she yelled “if only i had another body everything would be alright”…which pretty much freaked us out until we realized she was talking about her PollyPocket doll. Phew. But the odds are the words may stay the same, as the subject changes from PollyP to her. Which is exactly why we created Off Our Chests.
As is the conversation inspired by Mir’s story, and the stories you’ve all shared in response. Thanks for it.
There’s a mad crisis of confidence affecting girls and women. Nearly 50% of girls 11-16 would consider plastic surgery to change their looks. Over 50% of 12 yo girls don’t think they’re “pretty enough”. By the time they’re 17…that’ll be over 70% of them feeling that way. Some ridiculous number of women (our opinion) would rather be hit by a truck than overweight. Having not ever been hit by a truck, we expect that’s a bad decision.
Megan’s point about the only inevitability being the propensity to compare ourselves is a really important one. We all react to what we see, and don’t; hear – and don’t; are taught – and not. We can’t compare ourselves to what we don’t see, hear, and aren’t taught. And we’re not seeing a lot of diversity or reality in the images presented us by and inside popular culture. And that needs to change.
But now we’re rambling, and so let we’ll end where we started which is thanking you all for adding to the conversation…because when you share your stories, you can change “hers”. Xo, OOC
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Sadly, this same thing affects boys. My 10 year old aspie boy is convinced he’s fat. And he obsesses about it as only a spectrum kid can. He’s 10, weighs 90 pounds and plays travel sports so it’s almost ALL muscle. And yet he often says he hates his body, wears oversized clothing to hide his “fat stomach” and “big butt” and won’t go shirtless at the pool. It makes me want to cry all the time…
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Great discussion. Although god has blessed me with (4) boys, and a lot of the conversation here is moot for me, I, myself have just received an excellent lesson that I am sharing with my kids anyway. Courtesy of http://www.GeneenRoth.com... Your body is exactly the size it needs to be to house your SELF. Your body is the place in the world where you exist. Without it and/or) less of it, who you are would not BE. You MUST take up space. It takes the discussion away from food and aims it toward wholeness.
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At nearly 10, my daughter has started to worry that as she grows, she will gain weight and no longer be so skinny. I told her to look at my body and that I hoped she liked it because it was going to be the body she had when she grew up. I explained that overall I was pretty content with my body. I pointed out the things that bothered me (no hips for one) and said how other women might actually be jealous of what I perceived as flaws. I explained that her body was absolutely going to change but with those changes came some beautiful (and some less than spectacular) things. But regardless, she had no control over it so there was no point worrying about it.
We talked about the different body types we see all the time, including among her friends, and talked about how being healthy was the most important thing. If you are healthy you can do all sorts of things with your body that you can’t if you aren’t. (Me having a chronic illness definitely emphasized the point.)
It sucks that I will need to continue having these conversations with her and then just trust her to sort it out on her own. However, today she told me that she looked forward to being older and being the one to tell all the boys no. That she would be doing the deciding who she hung out with. It clearly is all about control but I think with that statement, she might actually be getting the point. At least I hope so.
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