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I struggled with body image for most of my life, and it\u2019s important to me to help my kids feel confident in their bodies rather than having the same insecurities I faced.\u00a0But as a mom, I know it\u2019s hard to control that (or control anything, right?).<\/p>\n
There are a couple of important things we can do to help our kids develop healthy relationships with their bodies:<\/p>\n
It\u2019s perfectly OK for us to care about what we eat, how we exercise, and to want to look good in our clothes for our husbands. But the way we talk about those things models how our kids will talk about their own bodies. Try asking about your clothes rather than your body. Try talking about food that fuels your body rather than calories or fat intake. Try talking about exercise as being important for your mental health and not just weight-loss. Let your children see and hear you modeling your own positive body image.<\/p>\n
At some point, our kids naturally start noticing differences between their bodies and their peers\u2019 bodies. They notice that some people are developing faster than others, some people look different in clothes, etc. It is impossible<\/em> to shelter our kids from these kinds of messages about their bodies.<\/p>\n But if we pay attention to the fact that the majority of those messages are about weight and attractiveness, we can start to add to the dialogue by talking about our body\u2019s purpose<\/em> and help our kids understand God\u2019s amazing design for their bodies.<\/p>\n A great way to do this is by casually mentioning how strong or how smart our bodies are. We can send messages so our kids start to see their bodies as being tools, rather than objects for display. We want our kids to recognize that their bodies do some cool things! When our kids play sports, mention how awesome it is that their bodies move or bend the way they do, or that their bodies instinctively know what to do or where to go, or that their bodies have been trained to do certain skills. When cooking dinner, talk about how amazing it is that our hands and arms have the control to carefully dice those tomatoes, and the strength and dexterity to do so safely. When our kids are falling asleep, talk about how amazing it is that our bodies know it is time to unwind, that our bodies are craving rest so they can do all the things they need to do tomorrow. When we get our period, as much as we might hate it, we can send our kids (boys and girls!) a simple message that it\u2019s cool our bodies are doing what they\u2019re doing. It might feel gross at times, but it\u2019s also sort of amazing.<\/p>\n While the rest of the world wants to talk to our kids about what their bodies look like, let\u2019s start focusing on talking to our kids about what their bodies are doing. And let\u2019s stop talking about what our own bodies look like. I know it\u2019s hard, and it\u2019s OK to care about what our bodies look like, but our kids already get enough of that from everywhere and everyone else. Who knows, in addition to helping our kids build healthier body images, maybe we\u2019ll improve our own body images as well!<\/p>\n