Body image: Like mother, like daughter

What do you do when you hear your daughter telling her doll that she's too fat? In her book “You'd Be So Pretty If...” Dara Chadwick explains that the way you feel about your own body has a profound impact on the way your daughter feels about hers.

Chapter two: It’s a girl! Her body image starts with yours
From the moment her daughter is born, just about every woman is clear on two things — all the ways she hopes her daughter will grow up to be just like her and all the ways she hopes things will be different for her girl. When I think about being a body image “role model” for [my daughter] Faith, I confess I sometimes feel anxious. I’m confident that I can show her how to be smart and organized, how to go after her dreams, how to be a loving mom who takes good care of home, friends, and family. These are all areas where I feel I know my stuff. But show her how to feel great about her body and how it looks?

Not so much.

When Faith was little, I used to read a ton of parenting books and magazines. It was practically an obsession; I was always searching for expert advice on what I needed to do so my baby would grow up healthy and happy. I was always looking for strategies for handling the latest “challenge” of being a mom. Somewhere in the first few months of her life, Faith developed a severe case of colic. Every afternoon, she’d scream for about three hours straight, so much so that I thought I might lose my mind. I frantically searched for strategies to outsmart colic, but there was no surefire cure. On one especially trying afternoon, when I’d driven and rocked and swaddled and sung until I could do no more, I called my mother at work and cried. She heard the desperation in my voice and said, “Dara, you need to calm down. The more anxious you are, the more anxious she’ll be.”

She was right. I took a deep breath and surrendered to the moment, and things improved almost instantly. It was my first real-world experience with understanding just how strong an effect my behavior and attitude have on my daughter.

They’re never too young to learn
As adults, we tend to think that kids aren’t paying attention and that what we say to ourselves or each other in hushed tones goes right over their heads. Of course, if you’ve ever heard a toddler repeat a questionable word at a most inopportune moment — like when you’re outside chatting with your elderly neighbor, for instance — you probably already know that kids are soaking up our example much earlier than we think. Little girls have long raided their mothers’ jewelry boxes and makeup kits, trying to be just like Mom. I can remember Faith begging me to put curlers in her hair at the age of three; she’d seen me using hot rollers while getting ready for a wedding and wanted her hair to be “so beautiful,” too.

Toddlers and preschoolers are little imitators, and they’re quick to pick up on the behaviors they see and the comments they hear. When she’s young, your daughter’s behavior is all about pleasing you. That’s exactly how I found myself suffering the indignity of a perm at the hands of my mother in the family kitchen when I was just seven years old. Though I was certainly curious about why my fine, straight hair wasn’t OK the way it was, I wanted to make her happy, and if curly hair would do that, then I was willing to sit through the stinky mess. After all, what did I care? I’d rather be climbing fences and having stick-sword fights with the neighborhood boys. Now I just looked like a poodle while doing it.

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As moms, we set the tone in teaching our girls about appearance and what it means. Karin, age forty-eight, was thrilled to give birth to a baby girl just as the second of her two sons was heading off to kindergarten. She filled the nursery closet with pink and had visions of dressing her little princess in ladylike tights, dresses, and hair bows. But Amanda, who’s now thirteen, had other ideas. Though Karin tried to dress Amanda like a pretty doll, by the time she was a toddler, Amanda preferred overalls and rolling around on the floor with her older brothers.

“I always liked to fix her hair, and she didn’t like to have her hair fixed,” Karin tells me. “She didn’t like to shop. It was all very frustrating to me.” Ultimately, Karin says, she had to let go and let Amanda be just who she is.

But letting go is so hard, isn’t it?

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