“I Hate My Body!” is a phrase many girls silently struggle with, often shaped by societal pressures and unhealthy body image messages they encounter daily. In this episode, Dr. Tim Jordan dives into this critical issue with Dr. Ashleigh Gallagher and Dr. Janet Boseovski, authors of the groundbreaking book Beyond Body Positive: A Mother’s Science-Based Guide for Helping Girls Build a Healthy Body Image. Together, they explore the pivotal role mothers play in shaping their daughters’ body image, starting as early as the preschool years. The discussion covers practical strategies, including modeling healthy self-talk, affirming non-physical qualities, helping girls become more image and media savvy, and fostering self-compassion to counteract negative body perceptions. This conversation is a must-listen for parents seeking actionable insights to empower their daughters and combat harmful body image narratives.
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I Hate My Body! When And Why It Starts And What Parents Can Do About It With Dr. Ashleigh Gallagher And Dr. Janet Boseovski
Dr. Tim Jordan back here with a brand-new episode of Raising Daughters. I have a couple of questions for you to think about. I wonder how many of you ever worry about your daughters and their body image? I think a lot of parents especially worry in the preteen and teenage years. I bet a lot of you also blame social media as the number one culprit on your list of reasons why there’s such distorted dissatisfaction with our bodies and with your daughters’ bodies. In this podcast, I think I’m going to offer you some different ways of looking at body dissatisfaction. Maybe social media is not the main thing you need to focus on.
In order for me to handle this topic, I decided to ask some experts who have just published a book, like within the last week. Welcome to the show. I’ve asked Dr. Janet Boseovski and Dr. Ashleigh Gallagher. They’re both professors of psychology at UNC Greensboro. Dr. Janet Boseovski is the associate editor of the Journal of Social Development. She speaks with parenting groups, teachers, and science educators about human development and also about this issue.
Dr. Gallagher is a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at UNC Greensboro also. She has a lot of research and teaching experience in areas of emotion, culture, and gender. She has a lot of experience working in public policy. These are two women who know what they’re talking about, and they just published a book. It just came out, called Beyond Body Positive: A Mother’s Science-Based Guide for Helping Girls Build a Healthy Body Image. Welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Writing “Beyond Body Positive”
I’m curious about what urged you all to write this book, other than the obvious, which is just a huge problem.
We’re women, certainly. As women, body image is a topic that comes up quite a bit. Not only are we colleagues, but we’re also friends. We actually would go to the gym together. As women, you just make various observations about demands on women, expectations, silly body trends that you see, and so on and so forth. We also developed some academic interests in the topic.
We had a former undergraduate student, Keston Harris, approach us to start a reading group on the topic. We started to read about women’s body image. We started to read about girls’ body image. We realized that there is a lot of information out there that moms could use, that women could use. People hadn’t really compiled the information that we have about girls and the information that we have about moms and how important moms are. We kept on saying, “Someone needs to write a book,” and guess who those people were ultimately?
The book is full of good research. There’s a lot of research to back up what you talk about in your book. One of the things I think I want parents to hear is that I think we tend to think about body image with teenagers a lot. That is an issue, obviously, for teenagers, but I think the concern starts a lot earlier.
I think that’s one of the things in our conversations that emerged. We were trying to pinpoint when we first started thinking about these topics. It was really hard to remember because it seems like it’s been all of our lives. As we delved into the research, we started learning about the problems that were going on in adolescence, but that these didn’t pop out of nowhere. Children as young as five years of age, even sometimes younger, are voicing discontent with parts of their body, “I don’t like this” or “I wish this were different.” That was pretty shocking to us that it started that young, but then when we started thinking about other aspects of social development, it made sense.
Children have a self that’s developing really early. As we know, they’re great observational learners, and they pick up things, even sometimes when we don’t want them to. Such as, you have a curse word, and suddenly, out of nowhere, your child knows that word. Where did they learn that from? We’re in a culture that emphasizes weight and appearance a lot. They’re getting this messaging very early. It’s unsurprising that they’re already thinking about their appearance and their weight and seeing what the gender stereotypes are. For girls, they’re learning those very early. They’re looking at parent attitudes. All of that is creating an impression, and that gets integrated into their own self.
The Role Of Moms In Body Image Development
You make a great case in the book that social media obviously has a place, but mothers’ roles in that are really important. About ten years ago, my wife and I were helping to facilitate a three-day weekend retreat. It was actually in Italy, in Lake Como, which is really nice. It was mothers and daughters, middle-aged girls and their moms from all over Europe. There were about 25 or 30 pairs, as I remember. We were doing some stuff on body image, and it was interesting at one point.
They were together at this point. We asked the mothers, “How many of you are aware of the things you say around your daughters?” The mothers were like, “We would never say things about our bodies. We would never criticize our bodies. We know that. We’re very conscious, and we’re very safe.” We said, “That’s great.” The girls, we said, “How many of you have ever heard your moms criticize their bodies?” Every hand, and both hands for many of them, went up. I think a lot of times moms aren’t aware of what they’re putting out.
Even things that they are doing implicitly, words that aren’t coming out of their mouths, but maybe the amount of food that they are or are not eating at the dinner table, or maybe their avoidance or hesitancy about being in a swimsuit or something like that. It’s not only the explicit words that moms are saying, which I think there is a lot of effort by moms these days to watch what they say, but sometimes it shows up even more in the things that aren’t said, but the things that are done.
The behaviors. The thing is, this is certainly not an attempt to blame moms. Moms have grown up in this appearance culture. I think once you’re in that, it becomes very difficult to, even with the best of intentions, completely disregard it. Even just things like a mom commenting on her own body, thinking, “It’s my body.” But when your child is young, your daughter is seen as an extension of you. There’s something called self-other overlap in the self-concept. Her self is your self. So if you’re disparaging your thighs or saying, “I look so awful,” you’re passing those messages on. Again, that’s not the intention, that’s how you’ve been socialized, but it is something that would be great if we could build that awareness into parenting.
How Moms Can Become More Self-Aware
How do you do that? How can the mothers who are listening to this podcast become more self-aware about this issue?
First of all, you can think about the things that you are saying. In case that that’s an issue, there’s a well-known tendency for women to engage in something called fat talk. It’s almost normative for women to do. Sometimes you actually feel like you’re sticking out like a sore thumb if you don’t participate. That is, sharing discontent that you may have with your body with your friends. You want to limit the amount of things that you’re saying there. You also don’t want to engage in restrictive eating practices, for example. You don’t want to limit your leisure activities based on concerns about appearance, things of that nature.
I think Ashleigh’s expertise as an adult, and some of the initial parts of the book, focus on having moms become aware of the kinds of things that might be issues for them. You might not know, like, am I a perfectionist? Or do I engage in fat talk? Or how do I think about people in larger bodies? Just really reflecting on those things can bring some awareness to what you’re doing because, day to day, we’re not thinking about those things. We just go about our daily lives, and there are some really nice questionnaires and probing questions from scientifically validated instruments in the book that moms can use to assess where they are on some of these things.
Things like levels of neuroticism, perfectionism, and the amount of self-compassion you extend to yourself. I found, just in teaching over the years, that students love learning about themselves from completing questionnaires. I think learning more about who you are helps you to find where those sneaky little bad habits of poor body image might be hanging out.
Sometimes parents will ask me, or my wife and I, “If you had to just pick one thing as far as how to become a better parent, what would you pick?” I think I always say, “Do personal growth,” because we bring a lot of stuff, good and bad, some baggage, to parenting. This is one issue where I think it would pay for moms to really do some inner work to figure out, “Where did my stuff come from, and what do I need to do to work through that? Otherwise, I’m going to pass it on.”
It’s so true. We do so much of parenting intentionally these days, like what we’re going to feed our children, what we’re going to let our children watch. As far as we are concerned, this is a place where I think moms can get more intentional and see a really big payoff in their children’s developing body image.
Dads’ Influence On Body Image
I also think a lot of the book is about moms, but obviously dads have a role. My wife and I have run a lot of father-daughter retreats, grade school girls and their dads, or middle school girls and their dads, and some high school girls and their dads. One of the things that we stress to the dads, and you can tell me if it’s right or wrong, is that they have a really important role in helping their daughters learn to value their bodies for a lot more than just the way it looks. That the comments they make, and the things that they say to their daughters, the way they treat their daughters around that issue about non-physical qualities that are important. You also talk about that in your book.
That is spot on. Dads do play an important role. They’re studied less, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. It is those principles of building for her a self that isn’t based on her physical appearance and focusing on all of her attributes and qualities, her interests. When it comes to the body, focusing on functionality, the amazing things that your body can do, taking care of our bodies and having respect for our bodies, engaging in health behavior for our bodies because we live in our bodies, we want to treat them well. That’s very different from a physical appearance focus.
We also talk about, for dads, what are you modeling with respect to things like gender stereotyping? What media are you consuming? Are you helping your daughter to understand that when you’re seeing sexist media, for example, if you’re watching sports or whatever it is that you’re watching, if you’re a father that engages in those things, unpacking some of that with your daughter too. One of the barriers for dads is they can feel a little awkward talking about bodies with their daughters. But we think just by having an open dialogue, if you don’t show shame and embarrassment, then your child won’t show it either.
Some of that is just getting comfortable with, “This isn’t real,” or, “Do you see what they said about that woman?” or that kind of thing, and showing that things like objectifying women is not something we want to be doing, not something that we endorse, and certainly not something that girls and women have to actually accept.
It’s not only the way dads talk to the girls about their bodies, but the way dads are talking about bodies more generally.
[bctt tweet=”The way dads talk about women’s bodies—whether to their daughters or in general—can greatly shape how girls value and view themselves.” via=”no”]
I was going to say that I have a patient I saw a few weeks ago who, she’s in high school, has two older brothers. She has a lot of body dissatisfaction that comes from a lot of places. One of the places is that she’s heard her older brothers, who she reveres, talking about other girls, or girls in their classes and stuff, about their weight, about their looks, and so then she takes that on.
It’s also about teaching them respect. If there are siblings in the home, we address that as well. Just some general principles about what it means to respect people as people and not focus on their bodies and certainly avoiding things like weight talk. Research shows that kids don’t want to be told about their weight, and this goes across the board. There was a large study about this. It’s not helpful. It’s not helpful to be told that your weight is a problem. If a pediatrician has to deal with it, then there are ways to deal with it. Having parents comment, and having fathers comment in some studies in particular, has been shown to be damaging to girls and has the reverse effect, interestingly. It actually later predicts obesity.
Some people think that it’s because it creates a very stressful environment and may actually lead to coping behaviors that involve eating. It’s just a bad idea overall. Again, it can be hard because there’s a stigma against being overweight, and parents want the best for their kids. They don’t want their kid to be teased. They don’t want their child to be hurt. It may be coming from a good place, but that’s not, from the data, the way to really handle it optimally.
We’re talking with Dr. Janet Boseovski and Dr. Ashleigh Gallagher, who both are professors at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. They published a book. It’s called Beyond Body Positive: A Mother’s Science-Based Guide for Helping Girls Build a Healthy Body Image, which I would recommend all of you get if you have a daughter.
More Than Just Your Body
When I work with girls, a lot of times I also have to talk to them about function because, especially with athletes, I’ve had so many athletes. I had a girl a couple of weeks ago who is a big-time swimmer. She’s, I think, maybe a freshman in high school, maybe a sophomore. She’s a really high-level swimmer. She’s been thinking she’s fat her whole life because she’s muscular. She has these big muscular thighs. She has these little stick-figure friends who she doesn’t look like. She, therefore, thinks she’s fat.
I always tell them, “Did you watch the Olympics last summer?” She said, “Yeah.” I asked, “Did you happen to watch the swimmers?” She said, “Yes.” I asked, “What did those women swimmers from around the world look like? Did it look like your stick-figure friends?” She said, “No.” I asked, “What’d they look like?” She answered, “They had muscular thighs. They had big shoulders.” The same with gymnasts. All kinds of athletes think that they’re fat, but they’re focusing on the wrong thing.
It’s, again, appreciating that you are more than your body. You’re a swimmer. That’s amazing. That’s an amazing talent, ability, and skill to foster. And again, you’re listening to these ideals that somebody else decided were the ideals. Says who? Says who that that is the ideal? We can actually say, “That’s not my ideal. I reject that. That’s not something that I subscribe to.”
I think, again, the reason we want to start this early is it’s really hard once you’ve ingested all those messages year after year. It doesn’t mean you can’t fix it. Certainly, you can, but by starting early with girls and developing a really strong self-concept of knowing that you’re multifaceted, there’s a lot going on for you as a person beyond your physical appearance. That tends to be protective when you do encounter those kinds of things.
[bctt tweet=”By building a multifaceted self-concept in girls early on, we can protect them from focusing solely on appearance for validation.” via=”no”]
You can also use those thoughts that you get about what your body looks like, those dissatisfaction thoughts. You can also learn to use those as a cue for pivoting to what the functionality is of those body parts. No, wait a second. I’m not going to think that about my thighs or my arms because those give me so much power. Those are a key component of what makes me a competitive swimmer, for example. Using those little thoughts as a cue to redirect to what the functionality is, is a good place to start to change body image.
I think another place that we fall short is preparing girls who are in grade school for how their bodies are going to change with puberty because, when they get to normal weight gain and they start to get curves, especially the first girl in the class who goes through puberty, the first and the last I feel sorry for. I’ve heard so many girls lamenting that they get taller, they get acne, they get curves, the boys start hitting on them or making fun of them. I think even all the girls in between, they don’t understand that their bodies are changing and why.
It can be just an awkward topic. Parents might want to have the tendency to put it off. I think some parents are shocked to hear that by 7 or 8, you should already be talking about it so that they are prepared for what’s to come. Puberty emerges earlier these days. The idea is exactly what you’re saying, which is to start having that dialogue early. Also, just the idea that bodies change throughout life. All bodies change. Your body is not going to stay the same. There are some times when your body changes really rapidly. That’s a way to introduce to them this idea that this is one big change, but all bodies change. You can see that there are different sizes and shapes.
You’ll see people at different points in time, and their bodies might look different. Bringing that into the dialogue early, there’s a way where parents can hint about what’s to come. One thing we’ve advised parents to do is work it into your daily lives. If you’re buying deodorant at the store, you can explain to your child why you’re buying that. Like, “You don’t need this yet, but this is what this does,” and that’s factual. There doesn’t have to be embarrassment or shame about it. I think the issue is when we bring embarrassment or shame to it, then suddenly they’re taking that in and feeling ashamed as well.
We have to do our best to not make it sound shameful. It’s just the way that we grow in height. Our bodies also change. That’s what happens. That’s a natural biological process. Starting early, having an open dialogue, knowing who your daughter is, in terms of some kids are okay with one-on-one conversations, some kids prefer a little bit of alone time in a book, and perhaps coming together and chatting too. There are individual differences there as well in how to approach it.
I like this point that Janet makes about bodies changing continuously, because that’s something that’s underestimated in moms as well. When we talk to moms about body image, our bodies are changing. We’re going through having children or having postpartum bodies and then maybe even going into menopausal bodies. The body is going to be continuously changing, and helping moms think about and approach that positively as well, and not seeing that as a bad thing, can be a great model for the girl who’s going into puberty.
This obsession with fitting into your high school jeans or whatever it is, why? Why must we aspire to fit into high school jeans? Why should that be a goal, given that you’re a different person in a different place in a different body? That’s probably not the healthiest way to be thinking about the body changes, in my experience.
They’re out of style anyway. The other thing I want to ask you about your experience is that, at some of my retreats for middle school girls, high school girls, and in my camps, sometimes we’ll have them make a list of the parts of their body that they judge negatively. I think we focus a lot on weight. I can tell you, after doing this for years, that they don’t just have weight. They have every body part that we own, earlobes, fingernails, toenails, eyelashes, eyebrows, lips. Every body part is on that list. It’s not just about weight.
This idea that individual body parts, it’s an objectification because you have internalized what is an ideal, and you believe that your body is being judged as an object. These various parts matter rather than the whole person. I think that, again, is a view that we try to avoid, that way of thinking. I think you’re right, especially in an age of social media where people’s entire posts are devoted to exactly what you’re talking about, like what your butt should look like, what this body part should look like. If you’re imbibing that, then suddenly you’re going to notice flaws where there’s no problem here. But you’re looking at it, and you’ve decided that there’s a problem.
Teaching Media And Image Awareness
I think this is an important piece too, how can parents teach their daughters to be more image and media savvy? Because I think the social media, all that, does play a role. I think our daughters sometimes are more ignorant than we think they are.
That’s a hard one. The key thing is parents do need to be, especially for younger girls, like preteens, they need to be involved. That’s probably annoying to hear because you’re doing so much as a parent already, and we’re adding this whole other element of things you need to watch out for. The amazing thing is children are more skeptical than people give them credit for, but there are some individual differences there. Number one, and actually, I loved your podcast on social media and how do you know when your girl is ready? Because you really hit on nuance there with, like, what is her personality? Is she more emotionally reactive? Is she more sensitive?
There are differences there in terms of a girl taking that in and taking things personally. How much does she need approval from peers and therefore look to social media to better herself, versus is she more skeptical? We have kids that immediately denounce Santa, and we have the Santa believers, and nobody really knows why. There are those kids that are just, “Santa’s impossible. Let me explain X, Y, Z, here’s why.” You have the kids that are like, “I’m all for Santa, and I fully believe.” There are some individual differences. First, knowing your child, knowing their personality, keeping tabs on what it is that they’re ingesting, but also having dialogue that fosters critical thinking.
One of the things that we talk about is there is a development of a theory of mind, which is essentially understanding the mental states of other people. When you see these posts, understanding the person posting this has an intention. Are they selling something? Are they trying to look a certain way? Educating children about that gives you a different angle on what this person is trying to accomplish. They’re trying to impress you. They’re trying to sell something, and that gives you a little lead into these falsehoods that underlie a lot of these posts. They’re not there to help you. They’re there to earn money. They’re there to get hits. They’re not necessarily accurate.
Looking at things like filters together, we have some activities that we suggest in our book around those things, just in terms of that education, but really having a dialogue about what people are intending to do. When it comes to celebrity culture, these people don’t lead the lives we live. I think it’s super important to talk to kids about that. We live completely different lives from these people whose entire culture is appearance-focused. That’s not reality for most people. We shouldn’t really treat it as such.
There are so many pieces there, but you’re right. That is something that has to be dealt with, I think, over time, hit head-on, and gradually you see, as their critical thinking skills develop, hopefully, they’re picking that up. We don’t have enough in the school curriculum. I think that’s going to change, but I think we definitely need a much more structured set of lessons around how to absorb all this information that, thank goodness, none of us had to grow up with.
I’ve seen research that shows that when parents, I think some of us, even particularly dads, when they sit down and watch TV shows with their daughters or movies or things like that with their daughters, and then stop and start and comment, those are great moments to give that kind of education. It’s like, “What are you seeing? What do you think about that? Why do you think they would act that way?”
There’s some really cool research too. I think it’s with college-age women. There’s this influencer who recreates dramatic fashion shoots and unrealistic portrayals of women’s bodies and does it in a playful way, not a mean or poor-intentioned way, but basically playing around with how unrealistic this is, playing around with, “This is not what real life is like.” I think just teaching girls to not take the things they see on social media so seriously, but to not only critically think about them but play with those ideas a little bit too. This is silly. Why would I want to look like this?
Difference Between Loving And Respecting Your Body
One of the things that I saw in your book that I thought was interesting was that there’s a difference between loving your body and respecting it. Can you talk about that for a moment?
I think it’s just unrealistic for some women, not all women, but to say, “I just really love my body. I’m very positive about it.” Obviously, it’s great when that happens, and we want to encourage people to be positive about their bodies as well. I think that it’s also a good development if someone can get to thinking about their body just more neutrally, without an evaluation.
Again, championing what the important functions are that your body does, but to take the pressure off of appearance and to put it on other aspects of yourself. One of the things we want to do is not necessarily talk in terms of body positivity or even body neutrality. We want to say, “Let’s think about our bodies less proportionally than we think about aspects of our character or our accomplishments or the things that we don’t know how to do, but that we’re excited to learn how to do.”
In that moment in their life, they may not be able to love their body, but they can certainly not focus on it and focus on the negative parts. They can focus on things that we all know, or I think we all know, that are more important than just their looks, even though the culture is saying the opposite. You also talk in the book, in several places, about the value of self-compassion when it comes to body dissatisfaction. Can you comment on that too, please?
Self-compassion has so many benefits, and we’re often our worst critics, especially girls who are emerging from childhood and going into their adolescent years. Cutting ourselves a break and talking to ourselves like we would a valued friend, if we heard our friend picking on her body, and even girls do this in childhood, they say, “That’s not true,” and they highlight an aspect of the girl that they like. If we could learn to behave toward ourselves like that, we have a thought that’s anxious about how we look, but we say, “I’m going to cut myself a break on that because I have so many other aspects of myself that are awesome. It’s okay if I’m not perfect.”
It’s also that you have the thought, but you can also say, like, I don’t know that this is true. I’ve had this thought, but I think something that’s very profound that comes out of this self-literature is don’t believe everything you think. That’s something that Dr. Mark Leary talks about in a book called The Curse of the Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life. We overthink everything. What is the objective reality of this? You think this, but is somebody else walking on the sidewalk, and they looked at your thighs and thought, “This is horrendous”? Probably not.
These are the stories we tell ourselves. We can also just choose to have the thought and say, “I’m going to let this go,” rather than harp on it. And I’m also going to accept there’s common humanity, understanding that everybody has these insecurities. Everybody feels bad about themselves every so often. That also takes it away a little bit in terms of that impact because you just realize that’s a natural thing, and I don’t have to harp on it. I can just say, “I had that thought, and I can move on from that thought.”
There’s an old maxim, I guess you’d call it, that we’re not in control of whether or not a bird lands on our head, but we are in control of whether or not we allow it to build a nest. When those thoughts about dissatisfaction with their bodies pop up, they can learn to catch it, understand what meant it, and then reframe it or move on from it or something so that they don’t end up ruminating it into this big story.
We would love to see moms model for girls this attitude of being your body’s champion and defender. “I’m not going to have those thoughts about my body. The world out there is prepared to give us all kinds of negative feedback about ourselves, but if we can see ourselves as the protector and the advocate of our body, then that’s really empowering,” I think.
Towards the end of the book, you have some exercises of things that parents can do with their daughters. One of my favorites, which I’m going to steal and use for one of my retreats, if it’s okay, is the one about writing positive body messages, like on the mirror or with sticky notes. Can you explain that one for our listeners?
Reading Positive Body Messages
When you look in the mirror, it seems like one challenge that girls face is immediately zeroing in on the things that are wrong. The mirror is a great place, and I’ve seen moms leave little notes of affirmation for their daughters on the mirror, like, “You are so awesome. I think you’re talented at so many things.” Put those on the mirror. If we could do those for ourselves and put up there things that we like about ourselves to counteract what we may be tempted to think when we look in the mirror, it can change the dread, perhaps, that a girl senses when she is being evaluative of herself in the mirror.
This was based loosely on some research that showed that the comments that mom is making in the mirror, if she’s making disparaging comments, and her daughter is exposed to that, her daughter is likely to pick up on the same things. Versus if she’s focusing on positive things that, again, are bringing out various aspects of the self, then the daughter’s also encouraged to look beyond the appearance piece and also think about other elements, and also point out positive things that she likes about herself. It’s a reorienting about the self in that sense.
Takeaways For Parents On Body Image
As we wind down our conversation, and this is not fair, but if you had to pick out one thing you’d like for parents, and especially moms, to take away from this conversation about their daughters and body image, what would that be? You can have different thoughts if you want.
I think we talk a lot about agency and the idea that you can be intentional about shaping body image. Society is throwing all these things. The media is throwing all these things at you. Random strangers are making comments about what you’re eating, what you’re wearing, how you look. They’re telling you what routine you need to do, and so on and so forth. What we’re saying is you can, from the ground up, protect yourself and build a more complex self that protects you from all of this. You have the agency to decide, what is the right way to approach it for you? Maybe social media is okay for you. Maybe it isn’t.
Maybe exposure to certain kinds of people, certain kinds of people that you hang out with, maybe doesn’t serve you well, but these other kinds of people do serve you well in terms of what is their focus, what are their interests, and what do they value about you? We really feel that by taking agency and intentionality, we get to have a say. I think women have felt for so long that we’re pulled in every which direction. Body trends change. This year, the trend is the clavicle. Another year, the trend is the butt. All these ridiculous things telling us what it is that we need to be doing. We’re saying we’re in the driver’s seat. We can take control, and we can protect our daughters by building this from the ground up early on.
[bctt tweet=”Body trends come and go, but we can teach our daughters to take control and protect themselves from society’s ever-changing standards.” via=”no”]
We, at one point, were thinking of the metaphor of being the CEO, the manager of your own body image. I do love that agency piece. That’s one of my favorites as well. Another one is that I think moms can downplay their importance in young girls’ minds. There’s so much coming out from peers and from media. Moms may feel like they don’t have that much influence over their daughters, but in truth, we know from the research that moms have a great deal of influence on their young daughters. In fact, they’re the chief and primary influence.
Teenage girls might be following someone online and hanging on their every word or recommendation for products. Little girls are doing that with mom in the early years. That is just so valuable when you realize that, and you think we can really capitalize on this and use this time and this influence wisely to help a girl build a strong, healthy self-image.
Thank you so much for writing the book, and thanks so much also for coming on the podcast. How can parents find the book?
The book is available on Amazon. It’s also available on the American Psychological Association website, and it is out. They’re certainly welcome to have a look. There’s a sample chapter as well that they can look at on both of those websites.
You’re always welcome to contact us via email. Our emails are in the book. We love talking about this, and you’re welcome to contact us as well.
I will put those links to the book and also to both of you so that if parents want to do that, they can. That’ll be in the show notes. Make sure you check that at my website, DrTimJordan.com. Thank you again so much for coming on, and thank you for your work. It’s so important. I think we blame sometimes the wrong people. I think friends have a huge influence. I think the social media, all that does. I think for parents to take, point the arrow at themselves, and have more self-awareness is a really huge piece that you’ve given to parents, so thanks so much.
Thank you so much for having us.
Thank you.
It is a pleasure. Thank you.
That was an interesting discussion. It’s an interesting book. There’s so much data out there. These two women, these two doctors, have put together a lot of good studies to back up what they’re saying and also have lots of interesting things you can do with your daughters, especially young daughters. Their book is geared a lot for age 3 to 10, they say, but it’s for any age. There are exercises and things you can do to start increasing your awareness, your part in it, and also things you can do as far as conversations with your daughters all along the way. I appreciate them being on the show.
Again, the information about their book and about them and how to get ahold of them will be on my show notes. Thanks again for stopping by here. This is an interesting and an important topic about girls’ body image and their body dissatisfaction. I hope this was helpful. I will be back here in a week with another brand-new podcast. Thanks again, as always, for stopping by.
Important Links
- Dr. Tim Jordan
- Beyond Body Positive: A Mother’s Science-Based Guide for Helping Girls Build a Healthy Body Image on Amazon
- Beyond Body Positive: A Mother’s Science-Based Guide for Helping Girls Build a Healthy Body Image on APA
- The Curse of the Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life
- University of North Carolina at Greensboro
- Development and Understanding of Children’s Knowledge Lab
About Dr. Janet Boseovski
Janet Boseovski, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research focuses on social and cognitive development in early to late childhood, and her work has been published in leading scientific journals. Janet is an associate editor of the journal Social Development and serves on the board of directors of the Greensboro Science Center and the Jean Piaget Society for the Study of Knowledge and Development. She enjoys speaking with parenting groups, teachers, and science educators about human development and writing about developmental science for the public. Visit Head Start for Healthy Body Image.
About Dr. Ashleigh Gallagher
Ashleigh Gallagher, PhD, is a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of emotion, culture, and gender, and she enjoys applying psychology beyond academic contexts. She has experience working in public policy and has co-authored a book on the opportunities available to researchers outside of the academy (The Portable PhD: Taking Your Psychology Career Beyond Academia, American Psychological Association, 2020).