Body Image - by Darylynn Starr Rank
April, 2007

I have a friend whose six-year-old daughter has this perfect little athletic body.  She’s all muscular and tight.  She loves to dance, swim, every kind of sport.  She tumbles around in the grass, on the sand, in her living room doing gymnastics whenever possible.   She’s not skinny because she’s got these strong little muscles.  And she probably doesn’t have an extra overweight ounce of fat anywhere on her body.  It’s those muscles again.

Well, guess what?  She thinks she’s too fat.  She has to lose weight.  She tries to diet.  She drinks only diet cokes, and not many of those.  She’s six years old. 

On the other hand her parents get scared of how she’s seen in the world because of her shapeliness.  They worry (because of comments they’ve already heard) that she’ll get the wrong kind of attention.  Too many muscular curves; too curvy, period.  She’s six years old.

We all know that what’s happening around young girls and their body images is crazy and out of control.  We know they desperately want to be skinny and they’re terrorized of being fat, beyond anything that’s even faintly sane. 

I was speaking with Katherine Aubrey who’s doing a workshop on pre-teens and body image, and she drew my attention to the fact that now a similar thing is happening with boys as well.  In the opposite direction.  Those layers of clothes they wear.  That look so ‘cool’.  It’s so they can look bigger…

But, I thought to myself, that’s always been there for the guys.  “Don’t be a ninety-seven pound weakling,” said the advertisement.  And the big muscular guy would kick sand in the smaller fellow’s face.  And I realized that Katherine was right.  What’s happening now is different.

It’s no longer just about being strong enough to win in a fight.  Which wasn’t great to begin with.  Now it’s about looking good.  All those young men in advertisements, bare-chested, in low-slung jeans.  The guys are becoming as objectified as the young women.  And often as self-conscious.  Taking steroids to get even bigger.

It’s all about looks. 

Katherine suggested that a critically important thing to remember is that there are so many other aspects of identity to nurture in our kids.  She absolutely “hates the idea of people draining their energy on body issues”.  Yet there is so much pressure to prevent kids from accepting themselves. 

There’s a terrifyingly large industry out there about how to lose weight.  And, I think, an inevitable, but even more terrifying new industry about rescuing people from anorexia and bulimia. 

Katherine suggests it really is about recognizing all the other profoundly important aspects of our own and our children’s lives.  And identifying how so many other factors, peer pressure, our own self-image, the media, and so on, distort our ability to do that.  Of finding balance.

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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