| How Parents HELP Growth •Showing support by parenting on the periphery of her circle •Accepting who she is becoming •Letting her choose who she wants to be •Showing genuine curiosity about her interests •Providing her with opportunities for choice and voice •Listening and being curious about her choices | How Parents HINDER Growth •Expecting her to be who you want her to be •Limiting her with labels such as “social” or “shy” •Deciding who her friends are •Being a “helicopter parent” •Believing the masks she wears are who she is •Pushing her to be perfect |
BEYOND APPEARANCES
I WAS A CONFIDENT teen. By the time I was sixteen, I had found my place in high school on sports teams, in band and choir, and with friends. I studied hard and earned good grades. Then it happened. One day, as I walked past a group of popular boys in the cafeteria, they called out, “Hey, Farms!” and followed it up with lots of snickering. At first, I had no idea that this unusual greeting had anything to do with me, but I became suspicious when this phrase kept popping up when I was around. I begged a friend to tell me what she knew. Reluctantly, she spilled the secret. “Farms” was a word they’d made up to merge “fat” and “arms”—and they were using it to refer to my arms.
Before this catastrophic moment, I felt beautiful in my body and was blissfully unaware of the normal weight gain teen girls often experience as they grow. I decided that my best weapon in fighting off these hurtful comments was retaliation—and this came in the form of self-neglect and, eventually, an eating disorder. I ate less; I ran more. I pushed, punished, and starved myself. Essentially, I developed an unhealthy coping tool to deal with life’s stressors. I thought my body was the problem and that changing my body was the obvious solution. Less obvious to me at the time was the underlying issue: my inability to love myself exactly as I was.
My challenge with holding a healthy body image emerged out of a lack of positive role models for how to love my body. Today, I want to share my experience with girls as a message: your bodies are not the problem. The deeper concern is the capacity to accept who you are and feel good about yourselves at any shape and size, and regardless of other people’s opinions. Looking back now, I feel incredibly sad for my teen self who didn’t know what to do with uncomfortable criticism and who was incredibly beautiful and healthy just as she was. Still, I am grateful for this experience. It inspired my passion to empower girls to be more preventative when faced with stress and strife. This chapter is all about body image—how deeply it is felt as a defining part of a teen girl’s overall image, and how it can be both a positive and negative influence. An adolescent’s view of her body can become convoluted so quickly as she grows and becomes more aware of what a body “should” look like. Girls are born loving themselves wholly and completely. We need to remind them of this and guide them back from self-loathing to self-loving.
Body Love and Loathing
“It’s a girl!”
Do you remember when she was born? Those chubby little thighs, round tummy, and teeny fingers and toes? What your daughter needed then was simple: your love and attention. She did not ponder if she should eat fast food for lunch. She wasn’t wondering how many calories she could burn at the gym later in the afternoon so she could eat the muffin staring her down at the bakery. She wasn’t stressing over every bite she ate, counting each calorie consumed. As a little girl, entrenched in the sensory experience of being and feeling, your daughter knew exactly how to love herself; it was natural and intuitive. At the age of ten, Alya told me this: “When I was younger, I felt as beautiful as a Disney princess.” I somehow doubt she still feels this way. Alya lives in a world that convinces little girls there is one physically superior look, a world where fifteen-year-olds such as Emma-Jane routinely say things like “I hate all the fat on my body. I don’t know why, but I do.” Born in love, learning to hate. So, what happens as girls grow?
As her parent, you may notice your teen girl’s emerging focus on the minutiae of her appearance, the drastic increase in her mirror time, the obsessing over hair, makeup, clothing style, and physique—more care, more conscientiousness, and more self-criticism. There are both biological and sociological reasons for this shift of focus to her appearance. According to Louann Brizendine, author of The Female Brain, when girls enter puberty, chemical changes to the brain facilitate this obsession with their looks. “The teen girl’s brain is sprouting, reorganizing and pruning neuronal circuits that drive the way she thinks, feels, and acts—and obsesses over her looks,” Brizendine says. “Her brain is unfolding ancient instructions on how to be a woman.”1 This speaks to the biological reasons why your teen girl may be obsessed with her appearance, but what else is going on? It’s possible that she may be mistaking looking good for feeling good.
Ginny Jones, editor of More-Love.org—an online resource for parents of children with eating disorders—asserts that a teen girl’s obsession with and criticism of her looks should not be looked on as normal or acceptable. She says:
We live in a culture that has normalized body hatred, and poor body image. This includes feelings of despair and anguish over the appearance of one’s body. When we hate our bodies, we believe they are flawed. Believing that the body is flawed, especially when one is physically healthy and able-bodied, makes us vulnerable to body hate, disordered eating, and eating disorders. What is actually “normal” from a health standpoint is body acceptance. True health occurs not based on a number on the scale. Health is only possible when we believe our body is fundamentally good. We take better care of our bodies when we accept them.2
I love that girls want to look their best, and careful grooming is a form of self-care. Still, I worry that girls put too much emphasis on their looks and embrace too much maintenance (lash lifts, gel nails, lip fillers, and hair extensions, to name a few) as they strive for the “perfect look” at the cost of true self-worth and self-acceptance. When girls feel too fat, too ugly, too awkward, too disgusting, they want to sink inside themselves, turn on themselves, or protect themselves by rebelling against any beauty standard at all. In short, they want to alter themselves and conform. One girl told me she wants to change “all my fat into muscle so I wouldn’t hate looking in the mirror so much.”
Sadly, as girls grow up, and especially as they approach puberty, they learn to hate their appearance. Most body self-criticism takes root between birth and puberty. Although she was born loving herself as is, cultural, societal, and even familial pressures promote negative messaging such as “Be tall, skinny, and this kind of beautiful, with flawless skin and a bright smile.” In other words, “Your body is not good enough as is.” She didn’t choose to internalize this way of thinking or to not love her body, but these messages are prevalent. In fact, we have become so accustomed to believing these directives that we also think self-criticism is necessary and important for self-development. In Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski discusses how women are reluctant to believe they are beautiful and to let go of self-criticism in order to nourish self-confidence and adopt healthy lifestyle habits. She says that body criticism is so entrenched in Western culture that most women hardly notice how ubiquitous and toxic it is. It’s so ingrained, in fact, that “when women start to think concretely about it, they begin to discover a sense that they need their self-criticism in order to stay motivated. We believe it does us good