How Do You Help Girls Grow Up Without Hating Their Bodies?
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If there’s one thing many parents worry about, it’s their children’s self-esteem.
And if you’re a parent of girls, chances are you’re even more concerned – research shows only 46% of girls globally have high self-esteem. In the UK, the figure is even lower (39%).
So, how can we protect girls’ perception of themselves – and is there anything parents can do to boost it? Charlotte Markey, a psychology professor who has a 13-year-old daughter, believes the key lies in teaching girls to be accepting of different kinds of “normal”.
“We should be aiming to differentiate between different shades of normal – and embracing it,” she tells HuffPost UK.
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Markey wrote The Body Image Book For Girls, out in September, and covered off topics including body image, puberty, nutrition, exercise, and self-care. Her inspiration for the book came when she was pregnant with her daughter, now 13, and thought about what she lacked growing up as a young girl.
She remembers reading about puberty and hoping for more in the books when it came to female bodies. “I would think, ‘There’s three pages on body image – but I want a whole book on that!’.
“When I found out I was having a daughter I thought, ‘Oh wow, I’ve been talking the talk on these issues; now I have to walk the walk’,” she says. “Boys and men have similar issues but it doesn’t resonate in quite the same way.”
It wasn’t until her daughter was a bit older that she started the book she’d dreamed about. She did a focus group with 1,000 adolescent girls – hearing about their thoughts and experiences of body image – as well as...
