What happens to your child when you say words like: cellulite, fat, weight? They take it all in and you could be affecting their attitude towards food.
The little girl, curly blonde hair still damp, is fresh-faced from her evening bath, ready for bed. She is in her pink pyjamas, her school clothes are laid out for the next morning and her books packed.
But it’s not time to pull back the covers and climb in just yet. There’s one more thing she has to do before she can fall peacefully asleep between the butterfly-print sheets. She heaves the gym step out from under her bed, and sets off: up down, up down, up down. Sometimes she does bicep curls with a dumbbell while she steps. Then she does sets of crunches on the gym mat her mum gave her. Laura is only 11, but she is afraid of getting fat. “After dinner I feel bloated and a bit big, so I try to make myself feel a bit healthier by exercising,” she says.
She is reed slim, almost boney. “My tummy is fat, and the tops of my legs are flabby. Everyone has something they don’t like about their bodies, no-one is perfect. So I feel I have to mend the parts that aren’t perfect,” she says.
“I’ve never been on a serious diet in my life,” says her mum, Paula. She says she doesn’t know where her girls get it from. Ellen, Laura’s seven-year-old sister pipes up: “Mummy drinks a drink to keep thin. It’s called Slim Fast, she buys it every day.”
Ellen and Laura have been seeing their mother shake instead of eat for all their formative years. Words like weight, thin, slim, gym, fat, cellulite and exercise have punctuated their childhoods. Ellen confesses that when Laura leaves the mat in her room, she does push-ups. It comes out more like “pooth-upth” though, as Ellen has just lost her two front baby teeth.
What may well have sunk in from witnessing this diet mania is a pervasive, deep-seated dissatisfaction with their bodies and themselves. The message they have absorbed is: thin equals beautiful. And only when you are thin and beautiful are you worthy of love and happiness. Thinness and self-worth have been inextricably linked.
“Mothers play a huge role in children’s perceptions of themselves. How we think about ourselves on the inside is very influenced by our mothers, their opinions of us and our bodies – and their opinions of themselves and their own bodies,” says Cari Corbet-Owen, a clinical psychologist with an interest in eating disorders. One study found that 34-65 percent of girls aged five had ideas about dieting. When compared to girls whose mothers did not diet, girls whose mothers reported current or recent dieting were more than twice as likely to think about dieting themselves.
“Mothers who agonise about their appearance, diet continually, devote much of their time and money to beauty, clothes, excessive plastic surgery, beauty enhancers, and who exercise fanatically, are role-modelling for their daughters the idea that looking good is all that counts and that absolutely no price is too high in striving to reach physical perfection,” says Corbet-Owen.
If diet and looks are common themes in a household, the youngest members will undoubtedly pick up on them. One expert interviewed in a broadcast about eating disorders in childhood described it as a “Trojan Horse effect”. Adults openly focus on body size, image, weight and looks; and while we are busy obsessing about ourselves, we haven’t noticed that in our midst, our children are showing exactly the same neuroses.
Comments