More pressure on girls

By Heidi Stevens

Chicago Tribune

It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg conundrum, the way we talk to girls about body image.

Nowhere is this evidenced more clearly than Discovery Girls magazine, which just triggered a firestorm with its article on flattering swimwear for 8- to 13-year-old girls.

“What swimsuit best suits you?” the headline inquires. “Find the perfect suit for your body type!”

Editors then suggest various options for girls who are “curvy up top,” “straight up and down” and “rounder in the middle.”

Now, 8- to 13-year-old girls being told they have a “body type” in the first place is problematic. That they’re encouraged to consider that body type when they select what to wear to the pool or beach – where their priority should be fun, not “is this flattering?” – is downright demoralizing.

“It makes me sick,” child development expert Denise Daniels told me. “It makes an assumption that girls in that age group are going to be concerned about how their bodies look in a swimsuit.”

I agree. But I also have a 10-year-old daughter who has a lot of 10-year-old friends, and I know that, honestly, they are concerned about how their bodies look in a swimsuit.

How could they not be, given the messages they’re marinating in, from the magazine covers they see in checkout lines to the billboards they drive by daily to the pop-culture icons they worship?

We can’t unring that bell. But we can stop ringing it so incessantly.

Thousands of readers

Discovery Girls has an estimated reach of 900,000 readers, and 8 to 13 is, developmentally, a huge range – third-graders all the way up to eighth-graders, most likely.

So some girls likely came across that article and thought, “What’s a body type?” Sort of like when Real Simple offers me tips for cleaning something I didn’t realize needed cleaning, like my ice-maker. You don’t know, in other words, that a topic is supposed to occupy space in your brain until someone tells you so.

Other girls likely came across it and thought, “Oh, good. I need this.”

Either way, my heart breaks a little. It breaks for the girls who just learned that how they look is more important than how they feel. Or, more to the point, how they look dictates how they feel.

And it breaks for the girls who’ve known this for years.

How do we do better?

“An article like that is so subtle that young girls don’t have the judgment and the life experience yet to look at it and say, ‘I’m being exploited,’” Daniels said. “They don’t know how to process it and read it other than to think, ‘I’ve got to be that. I’ve got to look a certain way.’”

That’s where parents come in. Don’t engage in negative self-talk about your body, Daniels said. Don’t talk about looking “swimsuit ready.” Don’t audibly long to drop a few pounds.

Don’t give your daughter more evidence for the case she’s probably already building – the one that says to be healthy and happy is to be thin.

Teach her that there’s no such thing as the perfect body, Daniels added, and that magazine images are make believe – edited and filtered and digitized to look just so.

(Meghan Trainor insisting that editors stop altering her body in her recent video is a great place to start this conversation, I think.)

And give her plenty of other topics to fill her brain – books and hobbies and pursuits that remind her of all the world has to offer and all she has to offer it, regardless of her body type.

Heidi Stevens is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.