Do you have to have your body image sh*t together for your kids?
Fake it 'til you make it
Welcome to Chief Complaint! For those of you who are new, this newsletter features intermittent musings about medicine, gender, parenting, and body liberation — all from your friendly neighborhood primary care doc. I’m so happy you’re here.
My son is getting too big for me to carry. But of course, he still loves it — and begs for it.
En route upstairs to the bath each night after dinner, he often leaps directly into my arms without warning from a few stairs above. It’s a tradition that a few months ago was unbearably adorable, and is currently a high risk activity for back injury. The little dude is become a true kid!
“You’re getting too big for this,” I tell him as I huff and puff up the stairs with him in my arms, or hanging off of my shoulders. (Side note: I have an idea for a competitive race called a “Tough Mother” where you have to do things like carry a 40-pound human kicking and screaming up three flights of stairs! Who’s in?)
“I’m heavy!” he announces, proud.
Then sometimes he says to me, “You’re big too, Mommy! You’re heavy!”
These offhand comments don’t faze me, really, except I still think about them, and I’m writing about them here.
It’s not that it sends me spiraling when a three-year-old calls me “heavy,” exactly, it’s more that it makes me think about what’s coming: A time when my kid will be aware of the gaze and judgment of others. When he’ll understand that our culture ranks bodies in a hierarchy of desirability. When he’ll realize that his mom isn’t … perfect.
Yikes. That’s the thing about parenting. It can get real existential, real fast. Why is it that I can deconstruct fatphobia with my students, with my patients, on NPR — but when it comes to role modeling it for my own kid, body acceptance still feels really, really hard?
Do we have to have our body image shit together before we can teach it to our kids?
That was a question posed by eating disorder therapist and fellow South Philly mom Cristina Hoyt, who runs workshops for families about body image and parenting. I had joined Cristina and her colleague Dana Monsees to record an episode of their podcast called the Millennial Body Image Project.
Since she first asked it, I’ve found myself returning to this question over and over again.
The short answer is no, we don’t have to have everything figured out before we can be good role models to our kids. I don’t think we have to wake up every morning, look in the morning, and shout “I am the hottest person who has ever lived!” to demonstrate an unconditional positive regard towards ourselves that our children can learn from.
(I first learned about the psychological concept of “unconditional positive regard” as a way of relating to my patients. It doesn’t require that I love my patients, or even like them. It simply requires a “warm acceptance of the person,” in the words of psychologist Carl Rogers. It’s a beautiful framework to apply to our relationships with ourselves, too.)
What does this role-modeling look like in practice? Here are a few examples from my own experiences and from stories I’ve heard from friends:
Swimming with your kids, even if you feel embarrassed about how you look in a bathing suit. If you sit it out, over and over, kids implicitly learn that body shame prevents them from participating in fun activities.
Same goes for any number of physical experiences that might trigger body dysmorphia: hiking, dancing, playing frisbee, etc.
Declining food because it “isn’t healthy” or because “I’ve been bad enough today.” You never have to eat anything you don’t want to — well, unless someone worked really hard to cook it for you, then you should probably try it — but you don’t need to explain why, especially if it’s rooted in fear of weight gain. Kids are listening.
Gently correcting your kids when they make judgmental or mean-spirited comments about other people’s bodies. And if they overhear you making these kinds of comments yourself, well… stop.
Remembering, also, that not all body comments are necessarily mean-spirited. It can help model body acceptance when you respond neutrally to comments like, “Mommy, you’re too big for this swing.” (There’s a three-way see-saw at our local playground, and my kid often says, “Mommy, you are heavier than everyone else on this toy.” True statement.)
Still, role-modeling body acceptance for my kid feels more challenging than in other parts of my life. Why can it feel so hard?
Parenting is high stakes, and it’s constant. When I go to see patients or teach a class, I have time to put on some armor for the outside world. With my kid, there’s no break — I have to keep it up when I’m tired, hungry, or feeling anxious.
And maybe that’s the point. Body acceptance is hard work. It’s a challenging psychological practice, the need for which doesn’t go away when I’m feeling down or, God forbid, “feeling fat.”
Kids demand that we cultivate the best version of ourselves. It’s one of the joys of being a parent. It’s also one of parenting’s biggest challenges.
The reward, of course, is that occasionally, I get to see myself through the eyes of my child.
He’s young, still, and still thinks I’m awesome. He hasn’t learned the ways we rank and categorize bodies, the ways we discriminate against bodies, the ways that misogyny and racism and fatphobia seep into our bodies. He just is in his body, and he sees me as just being in mine.
It makes me think of this beautiful poem, sent to me by a writer friend.
A question for you: How do you role-model body acceptance to kids? How do you do it even on days it doesn’t come naturally?
We have a bathroom scale, which gets most use from my kids enjoying stepping on it and seeing it light up (also helpful in answering, are they close to the carseat weight limit?). Whenever they step on it, I say, "wow, look how you're growing! You're getting stronger every day."
Yesterday, my almost-3-year-old daughter turned to me and said, "your turn Mommy!" -- I inwardly groaned, knowing the combination of 6m post-partum with her little brother + holiday snacking would not yield a number I have been used to historically. But I didn't want her to see me reacting that way. I stepped on it. She said, "look how strong you are Mommy!" which made me smile. And then when the scale face blinked off, she added, "Thank you numbers!" which is in line with her current practice of thanking inanimate objects ("thank you shirt, I'm wearing you," "come on spoon, thank you spoon."). It gave me pause: "thank you numbers." Hey, she's right. These are numbers. Data points. Information, not judgement.
So as I'm working to create a judgement-free zone for her, she's helping build one for me, too!
Awesome post and message. Thank you for this. I can think of examples while growing up of adults/family modeling this naturally, and not.