When you were growing up, you wish you had had more than magazines or the Internet to shape your ideals of beauty. We live in such a better age today, and as a new mama yourself, you have the chance to give your child what you never had – body positivity from a young age. What do kids need to know?
Here’s what to teach your kids about body positivity:
- Looks don’t matter much
- Fake bodies are everywhere
- Everybody is beautiful
- Food is energy
- Movement is important
- Health trumps weight
- Beauty ideals change
- Don’t pass judgments
- Model what you want to see
In today’s article, I’ll go over these 9 golden body positivity lessons that you can teach children as young as age five. The sooner you can freely talk about body positivity with your child, the sooner you can positively shape their worldview!
9 Body Positivity Lessons to Teach Your Child
Embed from Getty ImagesYour Looks Aren’t Everything
If you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s, then you had the benefit of living in the last age free of self-obsession (at least as far as we know).
Sure, you’d have your parents take photos and videos of you all the time, but they went into photo albums or slideshows. They weren’t splashed on the Internet all the time.
Having a smartphone where you can constantly take selfies and photos easily breeds that self-obsession. So too does social media, where everyone is always trying to one-up each other in the looks department or how awesome their lives are.
Before your child can get sucked into all that madness, you should sit them down and emphasize how their looks are but one small part of the overall.
A picture cannot convey the entirety of their personality. You can’t look at a picture and know how helpful your child is around the house, how well-mannered they are, how good their grades are, or how skilled or talented they are in things like piano or sports.
At the end of the day, these are the parts of your child that matter. Their looks will change between now and the time they reach puberty and again after puberty. Even into adulthood, wrinkles start to appear and gray hairs.
One’s looks are always in flux. It’s better not to attach so much value to looks to the detriment of everything else about a person.
This can be a hard lesson for your child to grasp, but the earlier they can, the less prone they will be to inflating their looks and believing that they must eclipse everything.
What You See Online and in the Media Is Often Fake
The next lesson you want to teach your child related to body positivity is what is real versus what is fake on the Internet and in magazines and other media.
It used to be that everyone used tools like Photoshop to manipulate their images. While major publications still do this, especially in advertisements as well as on magazine covers, nowadays, anyone can download an app to completely change how they look.
You might download such an app and then open it to show your child how it works. Try to block out the name of the app if you can, as you don’t want your child to see it and download it later.
Upload a photo of yourself and then alter it as much as you can. You’ll look very attractive by society’s standards but like a totally different person than who you usually are (which isn’t to say you’re unattractive, just no one is naturally attractive in a heavily made-up way).
Explain that the results of photo manipulation look believable enough that if you uploaded the edited photo of yourself, people would accept that as you.
Use this as a learning opportunity about deception. Tell your child that people heavily edit their photos because they’re not happy with who they are.
They wish they had different facial features or different proportions, so they use apps to make it happen.
Then explain how other people see this heavily edited photo (not realizing it’s edited, most of the time) and then compare themselves to it, which makes them feel bad as well.
The person in the photos doesn’t even look like how they do in the photos, but that doesn’t matter. If you don’t know a person in real life, then how are you supposed to tell the difference?
Share with your child how it’s okay to want to improve the lighting or maybe edit out some blemishes in a photo, but changing your entire face and body is not okay. It only makes you feel worse about yourself as you perpetuate an image that’s not true.
Encourage your child, when they’re someday old enough to post on social media, to be authentic when they can. It’s a refreshing change of pace!
All Bodies Deserve Acceptance
Here’s arguably the biggest body positivity lesson of all and the one you should emphasize above all the others. It’s the big takeaway of your discussion with your child about bopo.
Whether a person is very skinny, fat, or somewhere in between, they should be accepted for who they are.
This is still a radical idea in society (well, maybe not acceptance of the very skinny), so you should be sure to tell your child that. Be clear that if they accept everyone’s body regardless of size, they might be in the minority.
That doesn’t make what they’re doing wrong, though. If anything, it’s everyone else who’s too judgmental and who’s wrong. Your child just might teach others to think more open-mindedly, and that’s always a beautiful thing!
Food Has No Moral Value
Do you ever hear a woman exclaim that she’s so bad for having pasta for dinner or a slice of cake at night? It’s as if she committed a crime when she’s really just eating.
You don’t want your child to perpetuate that kind of thinking, and so that means helping them foster a healthy relationship with food.
You can and should teach a child about the nutritional values of food but be sure to stress that food has no moral value.
There are certain foods that are more nutritious than others, such as a salad versus French fries, but neither food has a moral value.
At the end of the day, food is simply energy.
If your child decides to choose French fries one day instead of a salad, they shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about that. Perhaps they just thought the fries sounded more appetizing.
Likewise, if your child chooses the salad over the French fries consistently, they’re not a better person for avoiding the fries.
When you assign a moral value to the food, some food becomes sinful or even dangerous to eat.
This can have a twofold effect. For one, your child might begin to feel ashamed of eating certain foods, so they’ll want to do it in secret. This can fuel eating disorders such as binging.
Second, when food is deemed off-limits, psychologically, we want it more. That’s true of about anything, as humans are wired to enjoy the thrill of the chase.
Once your child finally gets their hands on that off-limits food, they’ll eat so much of it they could make themselves sick.
By making all foods available, your child won’t fixate on any one of them. You’ll naturally want to encourage your child to eat some foods more than others, but just because pizza isn’t healthy doesn’t mean it should be entirely off-limits.
Moving Your Body Should Feel Good
There’s been an increasing trend of sedentariness in children in the 2010s and 2020s. Between video games, computers, smartphones, and tablets, there’s less impetus to get up and move.
You want to incorporate movement into your child’s life. Note how I didn’t say exercise but movement. There is a difference.
With exercise, the mindset is pushing yourself to new heights, like lifting heavier weights, running longer distances, or enduring for longer.
Exercise can have its place, but not really for children.
Movement is whatever your child wants to do that feels good. Maybe it’s riding a bike, going for a walk, playing tag in the yard with a sibling or neighbor, or swimming.
Allow your child to explore all sorts of different body movements to find their favorite.
Physical activity and nutrition are the cornerstones of health, no matter your size. Your child should have plentiful amounts of both but should never feel forced to move their bodies if they’re not feeling up to it.
It’s important to teach the value of resting and allowing your body to rest and recover.
Health Is More Important Than a Number on a Scale
When your child steps on the scale for the first time outside of a doctor’s appointment, it’s a good time to have a conversation about the scale and what it represents.
It simply tells you a number – how much you weigh. That number doesn’t make you a good person or a bad person, just as eating certain foods or eschewing others doesn’t make you a good person or a bad person.
It’s a number, nothing more and nothing less.
What’s more important is being healthy by incorporating regular movement and eating a well-balanced diet.
Even if you are healthy, you might not necessarily be skinny. One’s weight is influenced by genetics and not solely how much (or how little) you exercise and what you eat.
This means that healthy exists in a spectrum across a variety of body sizes.
You should teach your child rather than put all their value on that number on the scale that they should focus on how healthy they are instead.
This is another one of those lessons that are admittedly easier said than done to internalize. What I would recommend is limiting your child’s access to a scale.
There’s no reason in the world for a kid to weigh themselves regularly. They can still undergo weight checks for extracurricular sports or at their doctor’s visits, of course, but every day around the house? It’s not needed.
All that frequent weighing does is foster an obsession with weight and the number on the scale.
Depending on your child’s age, they might be too young to realize that things like the time of day you weigh yourself, what you eat before you weigh yourself, and what you’re wearing can all drive up your weight, as can the water you’re carrying.
They just see the number going up and could start to panic.
A healthy relationship with the scale is an infrequent one!
There Is No One Perfect Body
Here’s another huge lesson about body positivity to impart to your child. Beauty ideals are never consistent.
You might sit them down and show them how beauty ideals have changed from the 1920s to the 2020s.
They’ll see that over the last 100 years, beauty standards have favored skinnier women, then curvier women, then skinnier women again, then somewhat different skinnier women, and so on and so forth.
About every 10 years, society as a whole changes its mind about what’s beautiful. This will surely happen as your child grows up, which can be confusing for them.
You should tell them to largely ignore beauty standards. Most women (and men) can’t conform to them anyway, and the ones who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on plastic surgery to try usually end up regretting it.
Tell your child to embrace their own definition of beauty based on those they know in their own lives, such as teachers, family members, or maybe friends’ parents. These standards are a lot easier to live up to!
Don’t Judge Others Based on Their Size
Children aren’t born with inherent biases except having a decent sense of the difference between good and evil. If they see a person of a different size, they don’t necessarily pass judgment on that person because they don’t think to.
That said, things like peer pressure and outside influences can change that, so make sure that your child isn’t being judgmental towards others who don’t look like them.
Whether it’s someone a lot smaller or a lot bigger, they deserve the same basic human decency that we all do.
Sometimes a very skinny person wishes they could put on weight, but their metabolism or certain medical conditions might preclude them from doing it. They’re insecure about their size, and it being mentioned by a stranger only makes that worse.
As I mentioned earlier, a larger-bodied person might be predisposed to weigh a certain amount or find it hard to lose weight due to genetics. They could monitor their calories and get plenty of exercises but their size doesn’t change much.
It’s unfair to pass judgment on someone without knowing anything about them. You should tell your child to never assume things about people, like that a bigger person eats nothing but burgers and donuts all day and that a smaller person doesn’t eat at all.
Practice What You Preach!
This last tip is for the parents reading this, not the children.
You are your child’s role model as their parent. They look up to you and will model the behavior you display.
Thus, if you want your child to be body positive, you need to be body positive yourself. You want to model the behaviors discussed throughout this article every chance you get.
Don’t attach moral value to food. Don’t pass judgment on others based on their looks and size. Avoid putting too much value into your own looks.
The solidarity you have with your child will make it easier for them to navigate today’s not-quite-body-positive world if they know that they always have your support.
Conclusion
There’s a lot to teach your kids about body positivity. Once they’re around age five, it’s a good idea to bring the above points up at various times. Your involvement in their lives can help them form a healthy, good attitude that will take them far in this life.
