E2- Body Image and Kids

In this episode, we discuss potential body image issues in kids, how to talk to them about body neutrality and body diversity, and how weightlifting and other strength sports can provide fitness opportunities for all body types.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to Divergent Fitness Podcast. I'm your host, Amber Sobrio-Ritter. I'm a mom of three boys and I'm a behavior analyst, a personal trainer, and today we are going to talk about body image in kids. As adults, we have a lot of tools and emotional resources to navigate some of the toxic information we are getting about the ways our bodies are meant to be presented to the world, but kids are little and they don't have all of the information and life experience and are still struggling under these really false belief systems. So, we're going to talk about a few ways that you can provide your child with a new perspective and help them see things a little bit differently and ideally adopt a completely different mindset around body image.

So kids today are dealing with really unique challenges around body image because they are growing up with computers in a way that I didn't. Right? So, I'm essentially trying to parent a child through a life that I have no experience living and so there are special considerations when we take this into account. Unsurprisingly kids who spend a lot of time on social media have a higher rate of comparing their body to others body images. And what they often do is upline comparison, which means they compare themselves to someone that they perceive as better than them.

The tricky part about this is that poor body image is hugely associated with disordered eating and disordered exercise and so this can be something that, especially if they're not getting a lot of support at home, to have a different perspective or to view things differently, this can be something that can cause a lot of problems moving into their late adolescence and adulthood.

Both males and females have ideas that they are conditioned to believe about how men and women are supposed to show up in the world. Men also have standards that are unattainable for most regular people and are still under the weight of this pressure of needing to be perceived in a certain way and perceiving that people will not find you desirable if you do not look like that.

If you have little boys, they are also trying to fit some societal norm and they are also getting the same kinds of messaging, so being sure that you are having these conversations with them, just like you would, if you had a little girl or if you do have a little girl, making sure that you really include both of them.

The other thing is that if you don't talk to your little boys about this, let's say I have little boys who don't have any body image issues, so I never talked to them about this. They don't understand and could potentially use their ignorance as a way of harming somebody else. So if we don't talk about body diversity, we don't talk about how bodies change through the lifespan, they’re getting the messaging that they're getting from their peers and from society and then they are potentially regurgitating that messaging.

So, if I don't teach my kids, even if they have no body image issues, if I don't teach them about this, they can weaponize that language. They can be unkind to somebody else. They can regurgitate that to a peer because it's based on the only perspective that they ever got, which is the one that society fed them through advertising and other forms of media.

So it's really important, just like with consent. You talk about consent with little boys and little girls. You talk about body image with little boys and little girls, knowing that it's not only going to benefit your child, it's going to benefit all the children that your child comes into contact with.

Before I dive into these three strategies, I just want to say that if my kids say something that I perceive to be unkind, or is some sort of body shaming to either themselves or each other, or says it about somebody in the community, if I haven't had this conversation with them, I do not approach that by shaming them or by calling them unkind or by punishing them. I just recognize that I potentially either haven't at all, or haven't enough, given them this other perspective from which they can pull and they need more education and more information, potentially more strategies around having this different perspective. They need more support.

As a behavior analyst, usually if you have a person who's struggling to meet some goal, you just recognize that there's not enough support in place. You don't make any judgements about that person's character or the disposition or the personality. You just recognize that the level of support that's currently being provided is insufficient. So the great news is that if you've never had this conversation with your kids before, there's a lot of really great improvement that can be made. Like they've never had this other perspective and now they're going to, which is wonderful. Or maybe you've tried to articulate this perspective, but didn't exactly know how. And if you have had this conversation with your kids before, there are always ways to improve and hopefully there will be some new ideas that you've never before implemented.

The first strategy that I use is modeling. I use a lot of modeling language, which means I use the language out loud that I want my children to use out loud, and that I want them to use in their own head. The way that I talk to my kids and the way that my kids hear me talk about myself, is going to be the way they talk to themselves. That's going to be the voice inside of their head as they get older, or it's going to be part. It's going to be one big voice inside their head as they get older. I want them to hear me talking about myself, and to myself, and about other people, in a way that I would be happy for them to be mimicking that behavior. I would be happy for them to also be talking to themselves and other people in the same way.

What I model is kindness towards my own body, so caring for it for reasons outside of aesthetics. So, I might talk about eating to fuel goals. I might talk about how I'm so thankful that I get to connect with them over this shared meal. I'm going to discuss like, "Oh my gosh, my body's really been craving this meal. I've been lifting a lot of weight in the gym." Or, "Oh, I just needed something sweet tonight. This is so good." You know, really talking about food in a way where I'm enjoying it for whatever reason, that doesn't have to do with body aesthetics.

The paradigm that I subscribe to is that you are not going to be able to sustain some diet where you have to remove an entire food group, or food groups from your diet in order to be successful, and it creates disordered eating when your kid seeing you going to these really big extremes. So if I'm eating a salad or I say, "I have to eat a salad to be healthy." That's not entirely true because you have to eat a lot of things. Your body needs like a lot of food diversity and food density can come in lots of different kinds of foods. Salads are not the only way that our body gets what it needs. So like, "Oh, my body's really been craving this salad because I haven't had greens lately." Or some other way of discussing that so that kids don't see the only avenue towards health is this specific way. There are a lot of different paths that are going to get me towards health and teaching them to choose the one that's going to be the most reinforcing, the least punishing for them. Which one do they hate least?

The other thing is that instead of using language where I say, "I have to eat a salad." Or, "I can't such and such," using language that's more positive like, "I'm not going to have any ice cream tonight because it just doesn't sound good." You know? Or, "I'm just taking a break. I've been eating a lot of sweets lately and I just kind of feel sick." Or instead of, "I have to eat a salad." "I'm excited to eat this salad. It looks so good." Or, "I can't wait to eat this." Just making those tiny little changes can help kids to see that this is something that you are choosing. It's not, I have to eat a salad. It's like, I'm choosing to eat this because I want to fuel this fitness goal, or I really want to make sure that I'm getting a higher level of vitamin D because my doctor said I was deficient.

Whatever it is, kids are saying, "Oh, mom's choosing this for her body." Not, "Oh, I have to do this because I'm living under the weight of some propaganda that tells me that I have to do this." That can help kids to see it as being something it's not something to rebel against. Health is not something to rebel against. It's something that you choose, but based on your values, not based on the values of society.

Another thing that I do is I make sure that, of course I do not... I model kindness towards the kids' bodies and other people's bodies, so this might seem fairly obvious, but I just never comment on the body sizes of my kids or other people. It's so irrelevant to any conversation we ever need to be having. It just doesn't come up. And if the kids do it, I just model appropriate language. Like if my child says something sort of unkind about someone that they see in public, they whisper it to me. I might just respond, "Yeah. Bodies come in all shapes and sizes and everyone's responsibility to care for their own how they think is best." Then I just change a subject and we move on. I'm letting them know body shaming is not a choice here, in this family, and also it doesn't matter that person has so many other trait and is valuable in so many other ways, that have nothing to do with the way their body's being presented right now.

Another thing that I do is I place low value on the sides of the body as acceptability or worthiness criteria. I'm really discussing and elevating the value of other characteristics above physical appearance, like really highlighting, "Wow, that person is such a good dancer." Not making any comments about the body size. It's to so irrelevant to this skill that they are performing. Talking about this with my own kids, you know, who seem to of course be in a phase of their lives. I have pre-teens and then I have... Or have one child, I have one pre-teen and then I have one teenager and they're in a phase of their lives where they think that their body is the most important thing in terms of how people are going to choose. How potential romantic partners are going to choose whether or not to like, engage with them.

I'm always trying to elevate all of the other characteristics that have nothing to do with their physical appearance and remind them that so much of our value, 99% of the value that we have, has to do with all the other things and that we actually live in a society that just really is imbalanced in the way that we view bodies with so much focus.

Destigmatizing the word fat. So this one's tricky because being fat is something that larger body people have started to sort of retake the term and started to choose it back for themselves and really starting to own it and acknowledging like, "Yeah, I'm fat. I'm larger bodied and this is the way my body looks and it's awesome. It's doing everything that I needed to do for me."

So the thing is that when the kids say, if the kids said, "You're fat." If one child teases another one, "You're fat," instead of immediately stepping in and saying, "No, you're not. No, you're not." What does that do, if I have a child say I'm fat and I immediately respond, "No, no, no, you're not. No, you're not." What I'm communicating to them is like, that's not a good thing to be. So what happens when I tell a child, "No, you're not fat," is that I'm reinforcing to them that fat is such a horrible thing to be. Being in a larger body is so unacceptable and thank God you are not that.

So instead what I've done in the past, and what I would coach parents to do is that if your child says, "I'm fat," you can respond by saying, "Your body size has nothing to do with your value and your worth in this world." Then I would go through all of the different things that are meaningful to them and ask them whether or not their body size is impacting their ability to be successful in those areas.

I'll get into this a little bit deeper as I get into the second and third strategies that I use, but essentially I challenge that just by saying, as long as you're meeting your goals and you're living a life in mind with your values, it appears that it doesn't really matter the way your body looks. Does our doctor have any concerns? Do we have any legitimate health concerns? Are you pre-diabetic? We're not trying to get into a situation where I want my child to be unhealthy, but I think one of the biggest lies that we've been fed is that being larger bodied immediately equates to not being healthy. And you can absolutely be larger bodied and your blood work can come back great and you can be able to do the things that are meaningful to you and you can be living an amazing life. It's important that we let kids know that's a reality.

I also discuss with my kids how the body is just going to change throughout the lifespan. It's so normal that your body is going to go through different phases of development and that those phases of development are going to affect it in different ways. And so loosening the rigid criteria to present in a specific way for the whole lifespan, which is very stressful. I have to look like this for the next 80 years or a hundred years. That's not possible. Your body is going to go through lots of hormonal changes. The aging process, menopause, puberty, all of these different things, childbirth. The body is going to go through so many different things, and we have to be flexible about how we allow it to show up, as it does these hugely important things for us and help us continue to move through life.

And that these changes are adaptive and healthy and that if your body didn't change, if you went to give birth to a baby and your body hadn't changed, that would be concerning. It's very healthy to have a little bit of extra weight on your body when you are birthing a baby and keeping a baby alive post-birth. Think about when you are trying to go through puberty and your body is trying to grow. This is a big process. Your body is trying to put on so much muscle or so much bone mass. It's trying to grow you by a foot over the course of two or three years. You need to put on extra weight. Your body is going to need extra energy to be able to complete that process for you. So, acknowledging that my weight absolutely has to go up in order for me to be a healthy person throughout the lifespan can help kids loosen that rigid need to have it stay the same.

The second strategy that I use is that I focus on providing different perspectives to media messaging that kids are getting. So talking about body neutrality, there's a difference between body positivity and body neutrality. Body positivity is, this is my body. My ears stick out. I have stretch marks. My stomach skin looks like you blew up a balloon for a month and then deflated it and I love all of these things about me. I love them. They're beautiful. They're amazing. So you take all of the negative things that you would've said about your body and you just flip it.

Body neutrality, however, which is even better is that you look at your body and you say "It's doing all the things I needed to do. It's perfectly functional and I'm so thankful that it allows me to move through this life in a way that I value." It completes all of the processes needed for me to live a rewarding life and some days I don't like it. Some days I look in the mirror and I think I'm not happy with you today. And some days I look at it and I think, wow, you're killing it and that's okay. Like, recognizing that you don't always have to love your body. That's not a criteria that you need to meet and instead, appreciating it for all of the things that it does, and knowing that your perception of it physically is going to ebb and flow and that's okay and that you don't need it to be a certain way because your focus isn't on that. Your focus isn't on how it looks. Your focus is on what it does.

The other thing is that looking at media messaging. So the kids and I, and I embed this just within any little moment or opportunity with them, whether we're watching a movie or we're looking at a social media post, or there's an advertisement or a billboard out in the community and we break it down. So if it is a picture of Cristiano Ronaldo, who's a famous soccer player and he's chiseled. He has like an eight pack. He's looking so lean. He's holding a deodorant stick. This is a deodorant advertisement and the boys and I will look at it and I'll ask them a couple questions.

The first is, what are they selling here? They're selling deodorant. What are they trying to tell you about the deodorant? Well, Cristiano Ronaldo uses it, so it's like potentially really cool and really good because he's good at soccer, so probably he's good at choosing deodorant. If you want to smell good, or if you want to smell like Cristiano Ronaldo, you should use it. If you use it, maybe your romantic interests will like you, the way Cristiano Ronaldo's romantic interests, I'm sure like him. Just kind of go through what are they trying to teach you about this deodorant and what it means to use this deodorant?

Then the other conversation we have is what is this advertisement trying to teach you about men and how men are supposed to show up in the world? Like, okay, well, you're supposed to look like Cristiano Ronaldo. You're supposed to smell good. In order to be a soccer player, you should look like that, because he's a soccer player and that's how he looks. And really just going through all of the tiny little nuances of this advertisement. And at the end, what I really want them to understand is advertising is meant to make you see a deficit in yourself so that then the company can present to you this easily packaged solution and say, "Hey, but don't worry. Here's the solution to the thing that you don't like about yourself, that we've taught you not to like about yourself. Here's the solution is this deodorant." This is how we are filling the gap between who you now perceive yourself to be and who you want to be and the thing that fills this gap is the deodorant.

So letting the kids know that advertising is usually rooted in some sort of message about your deficiency in some way, so that they can then provide to you a solution and having the kids know that like, oh, well, the whole point is this. The whole point of this is for me to feel not good enough, so then I purchase this product. Okay, so that takes a little bit of... That provides a little bit of a different perspective because now I'm not viewing it as absolute truth. I'm viewing it as, oh, someone's trying to sell a product here and I don't necessarily need to choose to believe this.

The third thing that I do is values oriented goal support, so talking to kids about what's meaningful to them. If I have a child, if I had a daughter who loved to dance and she was larger bodied and maybe she comes to me and she says, "I'm fat." And I say, "Okay, that has nothing to do with your value and worth in this world, but let's have a conversation about it. Seems like that's something you want to talk about. Let's talk about all the things that are meaningful to you. Let's about all the experiences you want to have in your life."

So you love to dance. Okay. Great. Is your body size impacting that? No. Seems like you're a good dancer. You're meeting your goals. You're moving up. You are making progress. Okay. Check. You want to have good friends? Do you have good friends? Yes. Okay. It doesn't seem like your body size is impacting that. Do you want to have romantic interests? Yes. Okay. Seems like you have some romantic interests. Maybe even if they're not the ones that you are interested in. You want to have some romantic interests. You do. Check. So it seems like your body size isn't impacting that. Seems like all of your hobbies, seems like school, none of these things are impacted by your body size the way you perceive they would be.

Body size feels so, so important in our society that it almost feels like, wow, if I'm not thin, it's going to negatively impact literally everything in my life. But when you break it down, Hey, looks like I basically have everything I want and things are going essentially well, except for me continuing to feel like I want to be thin. I want to be thin. I want to be thin. Have we talked to your doctor and your doctor seems happy about the way that you're developing? Is your blood work okay? Great. So it seems like everything's okay. Seems like there are no concerns, so it seems like the concern is just coming from you and let's talk about why you're concerned about that. It's based on messaging that you've been getting, since you were little. It's based on false messaging. It's propaganda. It's programming that's meant for you to see it yourself as deficient so that you purchase a product.

The thing I love about weightlifting specifically, and I am a weightlifter. I started when I was 35. This is something that's been super meaningful to me and really important to me in my life, so I usually try to weave it in or just sort of like naturally weave it into any topic of conversation. But weightlifting is so wonderful because it's accessible to so many body types. It's not aerobic in nature, usually depending on the kind of lifting that you're doing, so it's really accessible to people who might be slightly de-conditioned or who are larger bodied. The wonderful thing is that the diversity of bodies within weightlifting is vast, so kids can look at a bunch of female power lifters and potentially see themselves. And same with little boys, who can look at like male power lifters. Wow, those people are really strong and their larger body. Turns out you can be really successful in your sport. You can be healthy. You can be moving towards your goals and be in a larger body.

It helps to present a different perspective about how bodies are allowed to show up in fitness. There's not only one way that a body that's fit is allowed to look right. It demonstrates health and strength at many sizes and the really rewarding thing for me has been to be working with my two oldest sons and it's one of the very last ways that they think I'm cool. I think even that's a stretch, but I'm hanging onto it and I take them to the gym and I think they get really excited about that sense of feeling stronger and all of the other men at the gym are so kind and encouraging and excited to see them there. I think people don't see kids very often at the gym, so they get really excited to see us already sort of working on this like healthy, balanced way of approaching the world.

So let's say a child comes to you and they say, "I just want to lose weight. That's it. This is just what's important to me at this phase of my life." What they're really saying is, "Mom, I know that this might not feel true to you, but I'm in high school and this is my world right now. This is the water that I'm swimming in and it feels really meaningful to me if I can work towards this goal of becoming more lean and I just really want your support on that."

What I want to do is take a magic wand and just make my child, or make that child, love themselves and say, "Why are you spending so much effort and time focusing on this goal that has so little to do with your value?" But I'm the mom, so it's hard for kids to really understand, from this big perspective, I have so many years of experience. So many years of practice working on this mindset.

So what I would do is I might say, "Okay, I hear you that that's really important to you right now. I want you to know that you're so valuable outside of this. This is such a small piece of who you are and you're healthy, so I don't think this is necessary. But if this is really meaningful to you, I'll help you with this goal."

The reason that it is helpful to get involved, as your child invites you, is that you can model balanced eating. You can model moderation. Because what kids do is because they don't have resources. They're not trained and actually adults do this too, honestly. They don't understand how to have moderation. It's tricky to sort of figure that out and to make sure you're eating mindfully and that you have really good body awareness.

So they might say, "All right, I'm just going to cut out this major food group. I'm just never going to eat sugar." And what's going to happen is they're going to get into this binge and restrict cycle where they eat really perfectly for a week and then they go crazy on the weekends and it's super unhealthy and it gets really disordered. So what you can say is, "We're going to avoid that. Here's the research that shows that you can eat totally moderately and enjoy all the things you love and it's going to be slower, but it's going to be more sustainable and healthier."

So you can choose to support them with that goal in a way that's healthy and fosters a really healthy, moderate relationship with food, while continuing to work on the mindset. I'm supporting you in this goal. Sure, I'll go on a run with you. I'll work harder to make dinners that have a lot of different kinds of nutrient density and I will also continue working with you on your mindset. I'm going to continue talking to you about how valuable you are and how amazing you are outside of this small criteria and how your body is very normal and how there are no concerns and how you're living a life in line with your values. I'm going to continue to work on the mindset while I support you, with the goal so that you don't hurt yourself, trying to white knuckle it through this weight loss. I want to support you in a way that's just super moderate and healthy and that's the way to really support your kids, to make some sustainable behavior change over time, in a way that's really gentle and loving towards themselves.

So as a last plug for weightlifting, I will say that for a lot of reasons, it's been really meaningful to be weightlifting. Not only to be able to share it with my kids, but also to be able to model for them like a mom working towards a goal. I paid all these years for them to be in soccer and for them to be in art class and coding classes and all these different things. But during none of that time, was I taking a class to learn how to do anything new. It's like you start to siphon all of your resources as an adult, if you have kids, just towards your kids. Save any of that for yourself, right? I want to master a skill. I want to move. I want to make progress towards some desired goal. I want to keep evolving and growing as I age.

I think the really exciting thing is that I've been able to model for them how exciting it is to move towards a goal, the kind of discipline and dedication it takes, how you push through when it's challenging, and then I can share that with them when we go to the gym together on the weekends and we're lifting together. It just really feels like a super special way to bond and I would love for more moms to have this skill of knowing how to lift weights and then be able to share it with their kids, for all of the reasons that I've shared. It being a really body healthy, body positive sport, that is accessible to a lot of kids.

So there are some strategies that I use to talk to my kids about body image. Let me know what you think. If you implement any of these strategies, if you have extra questions or comments, I'd love to discuss these kinds of things, so feel free to reach out and take care and I'll see you next time.