As someone who has struggled with body image issues in the past and present, I’m really concerned about the messages my children are exposed to, especially when close relatives speak negatively about their own bodies in my kids’ presence. How important is it to address this with those individuals, and what’s the best way to approach these conversations without making things confrontational? Is there any research that suggests overhearing negative comments might influence their own body image?
–Cami
People sometimes ask me what actually scares me as a parent. My answer is: cars, pools, and passing my food issues on to my kids. Which is to say, I hear you, you’re not alone, and your kids are lucky you’re looking out for them.
There isn’t a lot of data on the direct question you’re asking here. There is some work arguing that when parents directly criticize their child’s weight, it is associated with disordered eating. And mothers’ and daughters’ “fat talk” is correlated, although causality is hard to determine. Most of this work, though, reflects direct parental comments on weight, not overhearing other adults.
Another way to think about this: try as you might, you cannot protect your child from hearing things out in the world about weight and body shape. I’d like to think this is getting better (relative to the 1980s, say), but it’s still there, without question. Your job as a parent isn’t to make sure that your kid never hears this; it’s to offer a grounding place where they feel comfortable getting support, sharing, and asking questions.
In other words, policing the family members who talk about themselves may be both difficult and not that important. You could try a light “We try not to talk negatively about our bodies around the kids.” Or you could just change the subject.
Given the data, I would draw a sharper boundary on talking to the kids about their weight or bodies. That is a firm no, and should be addressed.
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We have this exact same concern, and actually ended up setting a boundary with certain family members who frequently make negative comments about the weight of other family members and family friends. The talk actually went pretty well, and they were understanding of where we were coming from, since we kept the focus on our concern about our daughter. We even educated them a bit about diet culture and why it was important to us that people who she may look to for guidance growing up not speak about it around her.
Depending on your relationship with the family members, it may be worth having a non confrontational, boundary setting conversation. Worst case is it’s a bit awkward, and best case is they learn something and start to reduce their negative body talk!