If you ask a 5-year-old what dieting means you are likely to get a variety of responses.  Most of us would like to believe that a 5-year-old would say, “What are you talking about?” or the wonderful “I don’t know.”  However, it seems that research is telling us that in fact we might hear something like, “A diet is when you don’t eat.”  Research from Florida State University indicates children as young as three-years-old think about their bodies and how they compare to their classmates. 

Here at Catlin Gabel, it would appear we are no less victim to this potential research finding.  In the last several months I have had numerous conversations with teachers, parents, and children about body image.  In my previous work experience I was very accustomed to talking about body image with adults and adolescents.  Never did I image I would be talking about body image to children as young as five years old. 

How children begin to have body image concerns is getting new attention in the research arena.  From my experience children are like sponges.  They soak up all experiences around them.  Like most human beings, once they soak up the data, they attempt to make sense out of this information.  However, young children lack the full cognitive ability to make sense out of this information.  As a result, they create “cognitive tapes” of what might be an explanation.  The tapes can be incorrect or at the very least overly concrete. 

For example, imagine you and your family are sitting around the dinner table.  It’s after the holidays and you decide you want to lose weight you put on during the holiday season.  You say to your partner, quite benignly, “I really need to stop being so lazy and get to the gym so I can lose this holiday weight.”  You and your partner move through the conversation never imagining that your little one is picking up on the information.  As an adult, we think about this information, analyze it and then decide what make sense to us from multiple angles.  We plan a sensible and healthy diet and we focus on being healthy in the coming months.  The child hears this and thinks, “Lazy is bad and fat is bad.  I don’t want to be lazy or fat.”  They go to school the next day and see their friend at the table next to them feeling tired.  They say to that friend, “You are tired because you are fat.”  No malice or ill will is being expressed here, merely a connection s/he has made. 

What can we do?
First and foremost our body image affects our children’s body image.  We must learn to be careful about what we say even in the most simplistic form.  Comments about our own or other’s bodies should not be centered around the negative or weight.  We should be aware that what we say is being heard by our children and often times interpreted in child-like ways. 

Be careful in talking about dieting or about being lazy.  Instead, focus on being healthy and talking about what that means.  An article in the International Education Journal suggests that young children learn about foods that are healthy and unhealthy but they have little understanding of the context of what it means to be holistically healthy.  What makes a person healthy is much more than just how much they weigh or what foods they eat.  The article goes on to suggest that programs in schools could benefit from a more holistic understanding of health.

Finally, it’s important to pay attention to what kinds of media our children are exposed to and use this as a teaching opportunity.  Media comes in all shapes and sizes including television, books, movies, music and magazines.  Open a magazine and you will see the modeling industry flooded with women who weigh 23% less then an average woman.  And yet, these women are held as the standard for what is beautiful.  We see retail stores called, “1, 3, and 5” and television is constantly parading stories in front of us about childhood obesity.  Depictions of body image are everywhere.  Even children’s books often portray physically bigger characters as lazy or slow. 

We can not keep our children from being exposed to media entirely, nor would we want to.  Instead, use media as a learning tool for your children.  Talk about these forms of media and teach them that health is a broad array of characteristics and that bodies do indeed come in all shapes and sizes. 

Here at school we have started to address these issues.  We talk about media literacy as early as first grade and do several lessons on body image in fourth and fifth grades.  The health curriculum has been expanded to talk about health as a variety of factors and that you really can’t tell if someone is healthy by looking at their body shape.  In a recent health lesson we discovered that children as young as second grade knew what a BMI (Body Mass Index) was and what could be considered a good or bad BMI score.  Our goal is for children to have a healthy lifestyle that includes exercise and good nutrition. Their ability to participate in activities (physically and mentally) comfortably is a good indicator of this.