Wellness Matters Webinar - Important Conversations: Talking with children & teens about body-image

Join us for an open and compassionate discussion aimed to help parents navigate conversations with children and adolescents regarding body-image. This webinar aims to shed light on important elements of these difficult conversations such as: Why these conversations are important, how to foster a supportive space as parents, speical considerations to ponder, and societal/cultural impacts of body-image to be cognizant of. These conversations can feel overwhelming for parents as there is no manual, however this talk will cultivate an open discussion of aspects to keep in mind to promote the overall well-being of youth.

Facilitator: Emily Collins

• What is the earliest age at which a child can start experiencing body image issues?

  Research has shown that children as young as three years old can begin to experience body image issues. This highlights the importance of starting conversations and modeling healthy attitudes early in a child's development.

• How does a parent's own body talk affect their child's body image?

  A parent's body-related talk, particularly negative comments about their own body or frequent dieting talk (known as "mother weight talk"), is highly influential. Research indicates that a parent's body dissatisfaction and internalization of beauty standards is a predictor of body dissatisfaction and even extreme weight control behaviors in their child. It is recommended that parents model body comfort and appreciation instead.

• Besides appearance, what other qualities should parents praise in their children and teens?

  While it is easy to compliment a child's appearance, it is important to also talk about the "all parts that make up a human." This includes their perspectives, interests, talents, and personality traits (e.g., sense of humor, kindness, curiosity). This approach helps in the child's value development and in forming a strong identity that isn't solely based on external appearance.

• What is the RAIN acronym, and how can it be used to help a child struggling with self-criticism?

  The RAIN acronym is a tool for practicing self-compassion and emotional intelligence, which can counter self-criticism and perfectionism. It stands for:

  • Recognize: Help the child recognize how they are feeling.

  • Allow: Allow them to feel that way in a judgment-free space.

  • Investigate: Investigate those emotions and thoughts (e.g., challenging unproductive self-talk).

  • Nurture: Encourage them to nurture the parts of themselves that feel insecure, reminding them of the safety and capabilities of their body.

Watch the video

Transcript

Hello everybody, and welcome to our "Wellness Matters" talk this evening: "Important Conversations: Talking with Children and Teens about Body Image."

Our facilitator, Emily Collins, is celebrating her fifth anniversary at River's Edge Counseling this week. I've had the pleasure of working with her for that long. She has been in a couple of different roles at River's Edge and currently she is a provisional psychologist. She works with kids, teens, and adults who are coming for counseling for help with a variety of issues and problems in their life, looking for growth and change. She draws on numerous different modalities in her work.

Prior to pursuing her Master's in Counseling through City University of Seattle here in Edmonton, Emily completed a Biological Science degree at the University of Alberta. Her background in early childhood education solidified her passion for working with people, especially youth. By recognizing the vast uniqueness of every person, Emily works to understand all parts that make up each individual. She strives to help clients feel comfortable in therapy by fostering a judgment-free, safe, and compassionate space. Emily recognizes it as an honor to hold space for all clients on their path to healing, growth, and self-exploration.

You can learn more about Emily on her bio page on the website. I'm sure you'll learn a little bit more about her this evening, too.

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to you, Emily. I understand your presentation is around 35 or 40 minutes, and then we'll have a chance to answer any questions. You are welcome to put your questions in the chat or to use the Q&A tool. I'll be here just making sure there are no technical things that come up and enjoying the presentation. I'll hand it over to you.

Thank you so much, Nicole, for that introduction. And thank you for the people that are attending tonight and listening to this presentation and potentially listening to it on the website. I really hope that there's something that you can take away from this presentation. So, I'll go ahead and share my screen here.

Okay. So, we are going to be talking today about, as parents or even just individuals who work with kids or are around kids quite a bit, talking to kids and teens about body image.

And just before we get started, I did want to just do a land acknowledgment. I, of course, work here at River's Edge, and I'm actually at one of our beautiful River's Edge offices right now. So I just wanted to acknowledge that we are on Treaty 6 territory, homeland of the Métis Nation.

I want to just talk a little bit further about my background and why this is an important topic to me personally. As Nicole mentioned, I am a provisional registered psychologist, and a lot of the work that I do is with children and teens. I love working with adults as well, but there's nothing quite like play therapy, getting to explore different things with kids and teens who are just like little sponges, learning all about the world and how to navigate different challenges.

I do have a background in the biological basis of psychology, so I'm very interested in development and how that affects our thoughts, how we behave, and how we cope with things. I added this little photo on the side, not to show off my super cool butterfly outfit, but just to let whoever is listening know that I do have a background as well in competitive dance, something that I did all throughout my childhood and my teen years. I actually chose this particular photo because I believe I was around 10 or had just turned 11 in this photo, and I can remember worrying about my body and worrying about how I looked in this very tight leotard. Looking back at it as an adult, of course, I look so young, and I can't even believe that was a thought in my mind.

But I think it just illustrates the point of how much these things can affect us very early on, and how much different pressures can affect children and teens as well. For example, in competitive dance, there are some pressures from teachers or just kind of the environment to be thin or to look a certain way. I know that's true of many different activities and sports that kids love to do, like gymnastics, swimming. For boys, football, volleyball. There are certain ideals that get placed onto us that can affect how we think about ourselves.

Lastly, as Nicole mentioned as well, I do work with a variety of different therapeutic modalities in my work. I'm kind of an eclectic therapist, as I think most current therapists would classify themselves, but a lot of my work, especially with adult clients, is rooted in psychodynamic therapy. Psychodynamic therapy is a framework which highlights early childhood experiences and how those can shape how we behave, how we think, and how we live in the world as adults, long past childhood.

I chose this topic not only because it's of personal importance to me, but just because I think it is of very broad importance. There has been research done that shows that children as young as three years old can experience body image issues, which is quite alarming. At three years old, a very, very early developmental stage. I think that just further illustrates the importance of us talking to kids about these things and helping them navigate these issues.

Youth today are facing a unique experience of having increased social media use, and with that, of course, comes increased body-focused media. We'll touch a little bit on that further later in the presentation, but it is quite a new phenomenon that youth today are having to work through. Of course, body image has an immense impact on one's overall sense of self and self-esteem.

It's also important that we help kids and teens through these issues because it can be a wide spectrum. Body image issues can present as a wide spectrum. It can be, over here on the spectrum, engaging in negative self-talk. Over here on the extreme side of the spectrum, engaging in disordered eating behaviors and eating disorders. Specifically, anorexia actually has the second highest rate of death among any of the DSM-5 disorders, behind opioid use.

I wanted to just show this quick video. It's about five or six minutes. I thought this was a really interesting video, and it kind of just further drives home the point that it's important that we open up these conversations with kids and teens about body image. This was an interview from Allure magazine, and it interviewed girls ages 5 to 18 about how they felt about their bodies and certain pressures that they faced. Many of the points discussed by the girls in the video who are being interviewed, we will kind of touch on throughout the talk, but it's really interesting to hear what they have to say. This video is about seven years old; I think it was from 2018. Even we can hear them talk about certain trends that have to do with our bodies, such as the thigh gap or "slim thick." These are words these girls are bringing up in their interviews. Those are words we don't even hear as much anymore, only seven years later. It goes to show how much, even in such a short amount of time, different trends can affect how we feel. It would be impossible for one person throughout their lifetime to adhere to all of these different things.

So, I will play this video and let me know if there's any issues with the sound.

[Video of girls talking about body image]

I just again wanted to show that video to show people that it is something that really affects many, not only girls, but also boys. I know that for parents, it can feel very overwhelming sometimes in navigating these difficult things because there are so many things that are not in the control of parents, such as many things those girls were talking about in their interviews: bullying at school or comments from peers, social media, what they're exposed to, so many different things to navigate.

When I was putting this presentation together, I really wanted to drive home the fact that there is no right or wrong strict manual as to how to navigate these difficult things. I think the word "considerations" in the title is very important because, ultimately, at the end of the day, you know your children best. Every child is very unique and has unique lived experiences, has unique resiliency and protective factors, has unique ideas about how the world works and how they will work in it. It's very nuanced.

Even beyond that, there are lots of different gender differences. Research typically agrees that for girls, a slim, muscular, and slender body is kind of the societal ideal. Whereas for boys, we're seeing more of what's now being termed "big." Boys want to be bigger. They want to be more muscular. They want to be taller. There are cultural differences as well—where somebody grew up, or kind of the cultural standards that they're being exposed to—that can shift how one feels about their body. Of course, developmental differences: how we speak to a six-year-old about these things might be very different from how we speak to a 17-year-old about these things.

Again, I just want to talk about the fact that this is an open discussion. I don't want anyone walking away from this feeling discouraged or overwhelmed, or even if they do have a child or teen who is struggling with body image, that they've done anything wrong. But just some really important points to keep in mind when opening up these conversations.

Fostering Open Communication

First and foremost, we do want to foster a safe space for children and teens to open up about these issues. Of course, we want to foster all types of different emotional communication.

Research has found that the use of parent-child emotional communication is correlated with children using healthy coping strategies and emotional regulation strategies. As parents, we do want to be open to talking about the emotions that come with some of these difficult feelings. As scary as it can be, that usually starts with modeling, talking about your own experiences of emotion, and using what's being researched a lot recently: co-regulation.

We're learning more about the fact that when a parent is able to acknowledge their emotions, talk about their emotions, and use regulation skills to help them through those emotions, kids actually pick up on that, and it can help them feel regulated in a given moment, but also teach them about how to navigate these things on their own when a parent isn't present.

Ultimately, through these conversations, we hope to normalize the experiences of emotions for children. There still is some rhetoric out there about, you know, "Maybe boys shouldn't cry," or "Just get over it, it's not that big of a deal," right? We want to make sure that kids know that everybody experiences these emotions, sometimes difficult emotions, and they're not alone in that.

We also just want to consider the space and the timing of the conversation when we're talking to kids about these topics. We want to make sure that they're feeling comfortable so that ultimately the conversation can be productive and provide support for them.

Specific Body Image Considerations

Now we're going to talk about just specific body image considerations.

1. Be Mindful of Your Own Body Talk

First and foremost, as parents, it is important that you are mindful of your own body-related talk. We do want to make a conscious effort to limit negative comments about our own bodies in front of children and teens, in order to minimize unhealthy associations for children.

As mentioned previously, kids are privy to so much media and even just comments from others. How often have we maybe said, "Oh, I want to lose weight so I can look good in my dress for that wedding"? We really want to move away from instilling that you have to look a certain way to look good. That first comes with bringing awareness to how we're talking about ourselves and even how we're talking about the bodies of others.

Research from 2016 showed that parent body dissatisfaction and internalization of beauty standards is a predictor of body dissatisfaction for their child. Internalization of beauty standards is referring to holding it of the utmost importance to fit into societal ideals or beauty standards. Instead, we want to really aim to model body comfort and appreciation and avoiding talking about dieting or exercising to lose weight.

Just a few further research articles to illustrate this point: specifically, mother weight talk and dieting talk was correlated with adolescent girls' extreme weight control behaviors and other disordered eating behaviors. We know that can be really harmful and really unhealthy for adolescent girls who are still developing to be trying to take control of their weight, like for example, in that video, we saw a young girl talking about fasting. That can take a toll on the body. So instead, we do want to talk about health and comfort and appreciating the things that our body can do for us.

Adolescent girls also mirror body talk heard from parents and peers. So, of course, if we are engaging in very self-critical body talk, that is affecting children, affecting teens, and they actually mirror those statements.

2. Diversify Your Praise

We also just want to be very mindful of the praises that we sing to children and teens. I know that we all do it. It's so easy to point out how cute, how beautiful, or how handsome a child that we really care about is in our life. But we want to make sure that we're also talking about all parts that make up a human.

Perhaps we want to talk about their perspectives, their interests, their talents that they have, or even personality traits. Maybe they really made you laugh that day, or they really made you feel happy that day. Those are things that we also want to make sure that we are letting children and teens know. That's a huge part of helping children and teens in their value development and figuring out what's actually important to them, other than just what's on the outside and what is presented to the world.

3. Dig Deeper into Self-Criticism

At the basis of all work with kids and teens and supporting kids and teens, we really want to help them understand more about how they feel. I feel this topic is interesting in that a lot of kids feel very ashamed that they don't feel good about their bodies, and they don't understand the emotions that come with it. They try to push it down or not talk about it, and that can be really, really harmful. It can leave kids and teens very alone.

So, we want to make sure that if your child is engaging in any body-focused self-criticism that we don't ignore it or rush past it. Again, one of the little girls in the video was saying, "Oh, her mom just says that she is skinny and it's fine," and that didn't really make her feel heard or seen.

It can be easy for us as adults to try to challenge these things for kids and teens in a way that might not be helpful, for example: "You're perfect," "Don't worry," "Get that dress on and let's get out the door." But we really do want to stop and pause and just give them the space and the safety to talk about these things a little bit further.

• Ask questions about how they're feeling or why they might be saying some of these statements.

• Become curious to promote their critical thinking and to further help them challenge societal norms and ultimately identity development.

An example may be little Sally putting on her new Easter dress and looking down at it, looking in the mirror, kind of rubbing over her belly and saying, "Why do I have a curve here? I wish it was flat." Again, it could be really easy for us to say, "Oh, you look amazing. Don't worry, you're perfect." But instead, it might be helpful as a parent to take a pause and ask, "Why do you think that that is an issue?" or "How come last week when you were at the store the dress made you very happy, and how come today it's different?" "Did somebody mention something?" "What have you seen?" We really just want to show that we care by asking questions and being curious.

We also want to help them challenge these things as I mentioned and ultimately form their identity because poor identity and self-concept has been found to actually foster greater internalization of societal standards. When we don't have a clear identity of our own, we look for identity in the norm, or what we think other people might expect from us or want from us. We want to really make sure that we are helping kids and teens form a healthier sense of identity.

With that comes helping children understand when their patterns of self-talk are unproductive, whether there are any environmental triggers that contribute to them not feeling good about their bodies, talking about what emotions come along with these statements that they're saying to themselves, and encourage them to talk about these thoughts and emotions in order to process them.

Again, for parents, this comes with drawing attention to your own patterns of self-talk that could be unproductive and challenging those in yourself in order to model those healthy behaviors and critical thinking for children. We know that issues related to emotional intelligence, such as naming emotions, articulating emotions, and describing emotions, are correlated with disordered eating behaviors. So, if we're able to enhance these skills for children and teens, we can hopefully help combat some of these really unhealthy behaviors.

In fostering this openness and helping kids understand the way that they're feeling, it can also be an opportunity for parents to learn about anything that might be going on in their child's life that they maybe weren't aware of: any comments from peers that have been kind of nagging them in the back of their minds, any instances of bullying happening in school. Again, it can be very beneficial for parents to do this work as well. It will really help them identify their own patterns of unproductive thoughts when it comes to body image and hopefully put in some work to better those areas in themselves.

4. Challenge Perfectionism and Cultivate Self-Compassion

Next, we really do want to try and challenge this idea of perfect and challenge the idea of perfectionism. I think kids, especially today with social media and with so many activities (dance, swimming, volleyball, school, doing well in school), kids have a lot of pressure on themselves, and sometimes kids put a lot of pressure into doing really well or to being as close to perfect as possible.

We do know that higher rates of perfectionism in kids and teens have been found to be correlated with higher rates of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating behaviors. Research also shows that interventions that address and challenge perfectionistic thought patterns have been effective in treating some of these issues as well.

Instead, we do want to try and talk about self-compassion and hopefully even replace some of those perfectionist thought patterns with more compassionate ones. One of my favorite things to question kids and teens about when they're experiencing self-esteem issues or body-related issues and engaging in negative self-talk is: "Would you say the things that you're saying about yourself to a friend or to a loved one?" They all typically look horrified and they say, "Absolutely not. I would never say any of these things to anybody else," because they're just so mean, and "Gosh, they would hate me and they would feel so horrible if I said these things to them." It helps them really wrap their head around, "Well, if that would make a loved one or a friend feel that way, why is it okay that you're saying these things to yourself?"

The idea of self-compassion can be a little bit vague or a little bit broad for some people. I do really like Dr. Tara Brock's ideas. She is a psychologist, I believe in the United States, and she does a lot of talks about self-compassion. It's kind of her passion project. She ties in a lot of different ideas and makes it a little bit more digestible, at least in my mind. She ties in the ideas of emotional intelligence, naming things, also mindfulness, paying attention to our body in a given moment, and self-compassion with this acronym: RAIN.

Self-compassion can be broken down into a couple of different pieces:

• R - Recognize: We want to help children and teens recognize how they're feeling, because sometimes with such a busy world, we don't slow down to even realize what's been going on until maybe it is a bit of a bigger issue.

• A - Allow: To further create that safety, we want to allow them to feel the way that they're feeling, with boundaries, of course. So instead of just dismissing them or saying, "Don't say that, you're great," we really want to allow a judgment-free space for them and normalize the experience of negative emotions.

• I - Investigate: Next, we do want to investigate those emotions. We want to investigate how one is thinking and feeling. That can come in many different forms, and that's perhaps where some of the challenging of perfectionism and some of the challenging of societal ideals will come into play.

• N - Nurture: Ultimately, we want to get to a place of nurture. If we foster these ideas and conversations with kids, they will hopefully learn tools to help nurture their own parts that might be feeling a little bit insecure or "not good enough" or "too big" or "too small." We really just want to nurture those parts and remind kids and teens about how safe they are in their own bodies and the wonderful things that bodies can do, and how it is a vehicle for us to do all the things that we get to do as humans in this life.

5. Encourage Healthy Relationships

We also want to consider encouraging healthy relationships. There's a lot of research out there that shows that for both girls and boys, positive peer interactions are related to better physical self-worth through the confounding variable of less fear of negative judgment from others.

We also know that, especially for girls, mother nurturance is especially important for the formation of positive body image, and father nurturance is especially helpful to boys.

Again, just to drive home this point of how important it is for parents to talk to children and teens about these things: talking about negative emotions within a child-parent relationship was associated with children using more constructive coping strategies, and emotional regulation behaviors are rooted in child-parent relationships.

6. Find an Approach That Fits Your Family

We also just want to consider, as I mentioned kind of in the introductions, the uniqueness of each child and the uniqueness of each family system that they are in. As a parent, you want to think about what approach feels right not only to you but also to your family values, what you work to instill in your child or teen, and figure out which approach would be best to introduce.

There are lots of different approaches and movements out there that have aimed to help model a more healthy sense of body image.

• There's, of course, the body positivity movement which focuses on celebrating maybe previously seen or previously classified imperfections, celebrating bodies, celebrating everything that comes with being a human and getting to move in these vehicles that we're given. Maybe that really feels right to you. Maybe that's how you work with your body, and maybe that's how you want to work with your children.

• There's also, on the other side of the coin, more body neutral approaches. A body neutral approach is kind of illustrated in this picture here: it's okay that maybe we don't have to be totally accepting of everything and totally loving of everything. We do really want to work, though, just to feel okay in our bodies and to avoid talking negatively about ourselves and other people.

• There's also a more health-based approach. Maybe you want to talk about exercise and diet and food through a health lens. Maybe that's really important to you and your family.

Ultimately, I think it's just really important to celebrate and help our kids celebrate and recognize all the things that our bodies can do: running, jumping, walking, dancing, all of these different things that our body allows us to do on an everyday basis.

Again, with these conversations, try to follow your child's or your teen's lead. In a world where children and teens often do feel like they have very little sense of control over things and they don't have as much autonomy as adults do, we want to make sure that through these conversations they are getting to practice a sense of autonomy and control, maybe about the environment, maybe about the timing, maybe about who's around when they talk about these things, all of those things. We just want to consider that.

7. Monitor Media Exposure

Last but not least, we do definitely want to consider media exposure for children and teens. As mentioned in that video that we watched, as mentioned in an earlier slide, youth today face a very unique experience—an experience that I definitely didn't have growing up as a young child or adolescent—of Instagram, TikTok, all of these different platforms. While they are amazing for helping stay connected and amazing for spreading really positive things, it can unfortunately also lead to spreading of not-so-positive things, and instilling objectification and instilling societal ideals.

We do really want to use education and just have open conversation with children and teens about the fact that a lot of what they see could be edited. It might not be an accurate depiction of what someone might look like on any given day. We also want to talk about the fact that that person is so much more than just a picture. What other parts of that person's life do we admire? What other parts of that person's personality makes us feel good and do we want to try and emulate for others?

Unfortunately, research has shown that social media use is consistently associated with negative body image, with long-term studies actually suggesting that this relationship strengthens with time. So, the longer that somebody is exposed to these body-focused media or very perfect-looking social media, unfortunately, that can decrease how somebody feels about themselves and increase body dissatisfaction, especially given that we are seeing now increased use of medical interventions for weight loss, specifically GLP-1s. We are hearing a lot in the news and in the media about things like Ozempic and Mounjaro. We do want to talk and educate kids and teens about how what they see online, those perfect images, may not be a result of a strict diet and exercise, right? There could be many different things at play.

It's important that we consider these things. We want to talk about it. We want to challenge the standards, and for young children, I do often talk with parents about just limiting excessive screen time or even just monitoring what a child or teen might be following, with respecting their privacy, of course.

I was actually introduced to this resource—it's a book and then it also has a workbook associated with it—by one of my supervisors. I was telling her about my presentation and my topic, and she thought this would be a really important resource to share for parents who might be interested in doing a little bit more self-exploration in order to facilitate healthy body image development for their child or teen. It's called More Than a Body, and it talks about kind of how our body is an instrument and not an ornament, so challenging objectification. It's written by twins, Lindsay and Lexi Kite. They have a really unique perspective on comparison, of course, because they have been compared as twins for all their lives, and how that can shape how we see ourselves. This is the book. There is also a workbook to go along with that.

And then these were the references, some of the research that we touched on today, if anybody wants to further read about these articles, and then images.

That is all I have for the presentation. We have a little bit of time for questions if anybody has any questions. If not, that's totally okay, too.

Well, that was amazing, Emily. Thank you so much.