Real Kids Come in All Sizes: Ten Essential Lessons to Build Your Child's Body Esteem - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

KATHY KATER is a psychotherapist in St. Paul, Minnesota, who treats teens and adults with life-threatening eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Her “Healthy Body Image” curriculum is used in fourth- through sixth-grade classrooms around the country.

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"Confronting two of this country's fastest growing health problems--body image and weight concerns among children and teens--this practical guide shows parents how to help their children maintain body esteem and make healthy choices a routine part of their lives.

At a time when they should feel secure in their body's growth, too many American children become anxious about size and weight and begin to eat in ways that contribute to the very problems they hope to avoid. Obesity, negative body image, and eating disorders are extremely difficult to reverse once established, and can be devastating to the self-esteem of developing bodies and egos.
Long overdue, "Real Kids Come in All Sizes challenges the toxic myths that promote body-image and weight concerns in our culture. Building a foundation for lifelong health, parents can use these lessons to help their children:
--Eat well and be active
--Accept size diversity in themselves and others
--Value health and well-being over image
--Be comfortable in their developing bodies
--Resist damaging cultural messages
--Develop a strong identity and choose realistic role models

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Chapter 1


Body Image Blues

Sounding the Alarm



Too many American children, particularly girls, are afraid to gain weight. The compelling wish to be thin or stay thin at all costs provides the seeds for a lifetime of intense, unrelenting, counterproductive conflict between hunger and eating, or between the body they were born with and, as diet advertisements promise, "the body you always wanted." Ironically, hand in hand with the greatest weight-loss campaign ever known, an epidemic number of Americans have become unhealthily fat.

It is startling to recognize that this conflicted way of relating to our bodies is now the norm in our country. But the outrage of our shock may drain into resignation when we realize just how big this problem has become. After all, what can we do if so many people battle their bodies? My goal is to make you believe there is plenty we can do. The house is burning, but we now know enough about the fuel that is feeding this fire to put it out--if we take action together. First, let's sound the alarm.


Beauty and the Body


Between 65 and 85 percent of adult women in the United States do not feel good about their bodies. Many men are affected as well. Most say this is because they are or feel fat, which may or may not reflect being fat. This dissatisfaction is not trivial. Surveys show that a lot of women would trade several years of life and career success for the opportunity to permanently lose fifteen to twenty pounds. Most of these unhappy individuals routinely engage in unhealthy dieting that in turn leaves them obsessed with food and ashamed of their hunger.

By the time they are in eighth grade, roughly 75 percent of our still-growing girls have adopted this distrust of and bad feelings about their bodies and have learned that they too should try to take control of the matter by dieting. At a time in their lives when they should feel secure in their body's growth, developing confidence in habits that would help them to become healthy adults with diverse, healthy weights, American children are increasingly worried about size. Kids who should be focusing on tasks that will help them grow intellectually, emotionally, artistically, socially, and physically are instead distracted and anxious about weight. Mothers feel helpless to intervene, fearful their daughters may be excluded for being too large. Fathers do not know what to say when their naturally rounding pubescent girls ask, "Am I fat?"

We see the toll of poor body image on younger and younger children. Once thought of as an adolescent problem, now almost half of normal weight third- to sixth-grade girls say they would "like to lose weight," and up to one-third say they have already tried dieting. We have not taught these kids to feel integrity in their bodies, nor that we want them to eat well for health and well-being. Instead, from a very early age they have learned to feel there is something wrong with them. Girls from the richest country in the world have been raised to worry first and foremost that they are not the size or shape they have come to believe they should be and that they cannot trust their natural hunger.


Body-Image Messages

How often do you:

* Talk about feeling fat?

* Say you should go on a diet or talk about being on a weight-loss diet?

* Bemoan that you have gone off your diet and that you have eaten "too much"--again!

* Imply you were "bad" for eating something?

* Speak negatively about one or more body parts (e.g., "I hate my thighs!")?

* Make fun of or criticize people's size or shape?

* Comment negatively about how much people eat?



Male Body-Image Worries

Boys are not immune to body-image concerns, although only a handful of studies have measured how boys and men feel about their bodies. Perhaps this is because the number of males who develop a diagnosable eating disorder is small. Fewer than 1 percent of men are diagnosed with these debilitating disorders, compared to between 5 and 10 percent of girls. The difference is even greater for partial-syndrome eating disorders (in which several, but not all of the criteria for a full-blown, diagnosable eating disorder are met). Estimates suggest that 30 percent of postpubescent females have partial-syndrome eating disorders, compared to only 2 percent of males.

Nonetheless, body dissatisfaction in males is on the increase. For most boys, the appearance of body fat is cause for some unhappiness, but it is the rise in their desire for a "ripped" (highly muscular) look that has drawn the most attention. For example, in 1972, only 18 percent of males said they "disliked their upper torso," but by 2004 the percentage had risen to between 45 and 55 percent.

While few studies exist, there is consensus that males have been affected by a significant rise in the number of images of "ideal" pumped-up men in today's mass media. A recent cover of Men's Health magazine offers an example of the standard that men are now challenged to achieve:


"Get the abs that drive women wild. Only four weeks to be the trim, muscular guy you've always known you could be!"


The heightened focus on bodybuilding, excessive musculature, and unnatural leanness is less motivated by health than by a growing insecurity about appearance in boys and men. Bodybuilding as a sport has been around for some time, but an increase in compulsive weightlifting and consumption of bulking-up substances has clearly gone hand in hand with changes in media images of men. We've also seen a rise in products that can be purchased to supposedly achieve the "ideal" male look. Most alarming is the increase--even among boys of middle school age--in use of anabolic steroids to build muscles and exaggerate male sexual characteristics.

While these drugs are not legal without a prescription, abusers find ways to obtain them, and advice about their use is readily available on the Internet. The effectiveness of these drugs makes them extremely seductive, and most users are either not aware of or deny the serious medical complications that are inevitable with long-term use.


G.I. Joe Bulks Up

A study published in The International Journal of Eating Disorders made the news by reporting curious changes in G.I. Joe, Luke Skywalker, Batman, and several other male action figures over the past thirty years. Findings show that if G.I. Joe was life-size, between 1973 and 1998 his chest would have increased from 44.4 inches to 54.8 inches and his biceps from 12.2 inches to 26.8 inches. The authors noted that, "G.I. Joe now sports larger biceps than any bodybuilder in history." Although his waist increased also (from 31.7 inches to 36.5 inches) he has "the sharply rippled abdominals of an advanced bodybuilder," whereas the early models have far less definition.


Although boys are now pressured into body-image worry along with girls, boys for the most part channel their concerns differently than girls. Boys who feel bad about their bodies are more likely than girls to divert their feelings into external things, such as sports, music, cars, and academics. They learn to use tools to build engines or empires outside of themselves. This focus on external projects that can be accomplished with their bodies may help many boys keep appearance concerns in check.


Girls Internalize Problems

Girls, on the other hand, do the opposite. Girls direct their body-image concerns inward and make their bodies into a project. Joan Blomberg's book The Body Project demonstrates how much time, attention, money, and self-esteem girls...