New research on girls and body confidence

New research by Dr Julia Coffey found that those with difficult body image concerns felt their bodies were constantly being commented on by parents and peers, and any stress or unhappiness in other areas of life would exacerbate existing body image concerns. Positive comments are not harmless either!  To ensure real and enduring body confidence, girls need to be protected from constant commentary about their appearance, weight, clothes, and prettiness.

Transcript

We have, after all, been taught most of our lives, that talking about other women's bodies and our own is how women are supposed to bond. It's presented to us as a good thing. But all the same, we would like to have one more crack at convincing you just how damaging body and beauty comments are to girls. So this is a new book, Everyday Embodiment: Rethinking Youth Body Image by University of New Castle, sociology lecturer, Dr Julia Coffey. And it adds even more evidence to the already very large body of evidence, that focusing and commenting on little girls’ appearance can cause lifelong harm. So what Dr Julia Coffey found in this book and she reports in this book is that those who had the most difficult time with body image concerns referred back to childhood and felt that their bodies were constantly being commented on by parents and peers and everyone around them. She goes on to say they felt they just couldn't escape it. It was impossible to choose to feel good about their body when it was constantly being talked about. And the research also found that these young adults with poor body image would direct all their stress and unhappiness towards their body. So when the young people that she interviewed were having were feeling stressed in other areas of their life, such as not getting shifts at work or relationship problems or peer problems, it would exacerbate existing body image concerns and they’d hate their body even more and feel even more strongly that they needed to fix their bodies. And so this doesn't just apply to negative comments about girls' bodies either. Positive comments are not harmless because when your daughter inevitably thinks that is not beautiful enough, and she will think this, we cannot protect our girls from this one. She'll very likely come to the conclusion that she's not important or acceptable or lovable. So we cannot stress this enough. If we want our girls to have real and enduring body confidence, then we need to protect them from the constant commentary about their appearance, their weight, their clothes, and their prettiness.