Children, the media, and Body Image - tell us what you think?

I think your sense of body image, is very much connected with your family & upbringing. Generally speaking (and of course there are exceptions) but body shapes tend to follow family patterns - partly genetically determined & partly due to familial eating habits. So, whilst I think it is useful to question media images of women & particularly those that are digitally altered, I'm not sure it will greatly change girls images of themselves or improve their ability to make healthy choices about what they eat, which is probably more important. I'm not really sure it is worth spending a whole lot of Govt money on it.

The media is to blame pure and simple. I just passed a couple of 14 year olds on the street to over hear "Would you rather be fat or thick?". The damage probably done when they were pre teen.

As a government initiative and coming from an advertising industry supported body I think this is deeply iffy, and doesn't really cover enough ground (it's not just body image I worry about but all the messages that the media push onto my children).

However I think that the concept as Lenin has outlined would be an excellent idea, in fact it is something our PTA equivalent (I'm not in the UK) is considering bringing in for our elementary school (so for 11/12 year olds). I talk to my children about this sort of thing all the time, but having someone external coming in and really teaching it very well is I think very valuable. In the same way that last year they had a session on homophobic bullying. Sure I reinforce this message all the time, and ds is pretty clued up generally, but there is real value in talking about this stuff with your peers and challenging their preconceptions as a group.

My very slim dd told me the other day that her thighs were too fat. I explained that what she was poking was in fact muscle, and that without it she wouldn't be able to walk...

Agree with Uppity.

Why waste precious teaching time on this? You can discuss it with 10 year olds until you are blue in the face, but do you think it will make any difference? The advertising materials are still out there, they are not going to go away.

How about banning adverts for make-up that promote false claims? Banning pseudo-science adverts for hair products, skin creams etc? No? Not going to happen? Didn't think so.

Well it's a load of crap isn't it - just an avoidance of the issue, which is that advertisers are allowed to perpetrate fraud upon the public with their distorted images of men and women. They should make a rule that says the message "this has been manipulated with x, brushed up with y and then re set with z" be printed as at least 25% of the image each time the advertisers used the techniques.

I hate the fact that they're putting the onus on girls and women not to be affected by the fraudulent images, rather than the advertising industry not to produce these images in the first place.

Much of the debate often focusses on girls, for clear and correct reasons. However, the media representation of the male body has an effect on boys too and I would say that this starts from the age at which a child of either sex starts to consume (or simply be exposed to) media.

The impossibly muscled, sculpted, pumped-up bodies that boys see everywhere are, in my opinion, just as harmful to self esteem as the skinny female models on the catwalk.

I don't think it's ever too early to discuss media manipulation with children.

Too late. Not good and too late. My four year old is able to differentiate between adverts and programmes on TV and we've discussed how the adverts are there to persuade us that somethings are desirable and some things not.

It's hugely problematic area though, kids just want to fit in, of course they do (apart from that troublesome year when they want to be emo/goth/vampire/death metal ). And all they see from the media is this unnatural idea of what it is to be a man or woman.

Agree with all those who say you should raise your children to be confident generally and active rather than 'cute' and 'pretty'.

But has this got bugger all to do with school, I'm not sure it does. Teach them science instead FFS - at least then they can decode the weird skin cream adverts with codscience claims in.

We were watching an old ads program with the kids - Bran Flakes - they're tasty, tasty, very very tasty etc..... when eldest dd10 turns round and said - well they wouldn't sell much if they told the truth would they!!! LOL

She said they should modify the ditty to be "They're tasty, tasty, very, very tasty, they're very tasty - but actually they're really dry and taste awful." So perhaps they pick up on the ads anyhow.....

Like Lenin and Custardo have said and a few others too
I is more about how parents view themselves how they value themselves and how what they value, it is not a school issue, although dealing with the aftermath may have impact on the school.

I often tell my 6yr old that advertising is not not stating facts to help you love better out of the goodness of their hearts, it is trying to convince us to buy their product

well, we have had the opposite end of negative body image - dd was told that if she was any skinnier she would die by her 'friends'

she has never had an issue with how she looked up until now

I agree TPP. Teaching people to basically resist advertising rather than regulating the advertising and changing society's attitudes generally to the objectification of women, just sounds like tokenism. And it doesn't/won't even touch the sides of the problem.

Hmmm.....so the government wants to repair poor body image without legislating TV advertising/media advertising aimed at children, objectification of women and pornification of culture in general, riiiiii iiiight.

Nice one.

Brilliant last paragraph, SuchProspects. Yes, Media Smart is an advert, and schools should point to it as an example of advertisers getting another toehold in schools.

Ask the children "Why would they produce this material?" To avoid tougher regulation and contribute to a positive image of advertising in your mind. "What do they want you to think?" That if only they can fine-tune the message and you can fine-tune your response, it is not problematic that, compared with just a few decades ago, the average woman's whole appearance is massively more dependent in dozens of ways on purchased products that batter its reality out of shape. "What don't they want you to think?" That we should buy less stuff. "How does this let them set the agenda?" By contributing to a culture of self-regulation ... etc

That should be "...no actual explanation of what's been done".

I think media literacy is a very valid skill for schools to teach. It's an important life skill and an important skill for work.

I had a look at the teaching materials they made available on the website. My major concern with them though is that they will do more harm than good. The emphasis is on sexualized images - not entirely surprising given that that is the major concern - but I think if you're just going to focus on it for an hour you aren't going to change attitudes. Instead you will have an hour long class that is putting sexualized images in front of the children and then they'll go off to break and the girls in particular will be compared to a lot of those images. Maybe some of the issues about image alteration will get through to some of them too, but I think it's going to be a painful way of doing it.

I think it would be better starting with images that aren't to do with body image (what about food advertising, isn't that often significantly altered?), so that children could focus on the way they are being manipulated without the same emotive feelings of not living up to expectations. Then introduce body images so that they can apply the techniques to that issue.

I personally dislike the use of "airbrushing" as a catch all phrase for image manipulation. "Photoshopping" might be a bit too brand specific but it covers the cut and paste side of things and I would have thought it's one the audience will understand better. Alternatively "image manipulation" is more accurate.

Finally, the materials looked rather shoddily thrown together to me and did not seem to include much information on what the techniques used in post-production actually are (some before and after photos, but actual explanation of what;s been done). Since this is supposedly something the children are supposed to be learning from this I think that it is quite concerning there's nothing explicitly described. Maybe some teachers on here could give a better critique of these aspects of the materials though.

Like others on here, I am somewhat sceptical of an advertising industry sponsored approach to teaching media literacy of any type. I think teachers who use these tools would do well to also use the example of an industry sponsoring curriculum to teach people to protect themselves from that industry as a lesson in media literacy too - Why would they do that? What do they want you to think? What don't they want you to think? How does this allow them to set the agenda? etc.

Agree with justafleshwound.
A lesson on body image is fair enough, but its only a sticking plaster.
Giving Mothers and the job of Mothers more respect would help the mental health of all children. Coming home to an empty house, feeling like your parents work is more important than you are make a child feel pretty rubbish. (but i fear i'm going off on one)
How about lessons on banking????? If you borrow £100 at 10% interest how much do you pay back??? Most kids will think the answer is £110. But the way the bank works it out means that over a 10 year term you'd pay back £200.
Now theres a useful life lesson, baffles me why thats not taught.

I like Lenin's curriculum.

I also think that adults should be educated about the impact of their attitudes on the children they raise. There are a lot of parents who seem to think their children are blind and deaf to the behaviours that go on in their homes.

I hate the title picture of the little girl measuring her waist. Just what I don't want my DD2 doing.

DD1 (13) is heartily sick of PHSE. At primary they waffled on about puberty, but never mentioned that this was to prepare your body for sex and babies
At senior school they had a huge bit about bullying and being nice to each other. DD said that sitting there hearing the teacher drone on about not doing what is done to her day in day out was not cheering. (she's had it all her life, she just doesn't quite fit in)

this is a parental issue and something that should not use precious dwindelling school resources.

at this rate with all the extra stuff teachers have to teach these days it really is no wonder kids fall through the cracks.

personally id rather this time, the time on healthy eating, the time on phse/citizanship bollocks and no doubt other things i have missed - was spent teaching children academia - this is a plaster on qa wider societal issue. what is needed is some real investment in parenting and parenting techniques. kids dot come with a handbook and we need help. mumsnet is proof of this. if there really was a campaign to bang on about mumsnet, it would be to invest in parents and parenting classes. changing societal norms doesn;t work this way. you can't change a culture ina school and expect that to permeate the kids home life, becuase it doesn't.

you can teach healthy eating at school - but if the parents cook chips.....yadda

you can teach body image in small bursts - no doubt interesting, but costing lots, taking time and affecting little change. then the boys can go home to dads/stepdads/mums boyfriend with page 3 of the sun and "look at the tits on that son"

the cause is a good cause no doubt about it and one which PARENTS shoudl tackle.

i absolutley resent teaching time being taken up for this, becuase this isn't the only thing that takes up time, its whatever fits the govt agenda of the day. Schools are at teh whim of govt agenda and quick fix societal propaganda.

Tend to agree with Lenin and Itsjustafleshwound. A prime lesson of media literacy in relation to advertising should be that truth is manipulated to create demand, and that consumerist capitalism has an interest in battering us with false images of our own inadequacy in order that it can sell us the cure. A media literacy agency funded by the advertisers can't really teach that in a trustworthy or radical way. Self-regulation doesn't inspire confidence in me here any more than in the drinks and food industries.

Media Smart is a bit like getting weapons manufacturers to teach us how to dodge bullets?

I have a 12 year old daughter, and I have had many discussions with her about airbrushing and photoshopping of pictures. I've also shown her pictures of celebrities with no make up on and she's starting to realise that there is no such thing as perfection. We now mock the adverts. She's also got the message that with make up, less is more and has moved away from the smudged black look to subtle browns.

By the way, I can't see the lesson without registering, which I don't want to do. Is there any time spent discussing how eating disorders can arise from trying to live up to unrealistic images? Are B-eat involved?

I think by the time they are 10-11 it's too late. PrettyCandles comment is anecdotal but bears out my feeling that kids pick up on this much earlier than age 10.

itsjustafleshwound we do all that, and I don't wear makeup either, yet somehow dd has already absorbed the message that you need to wear makeup in order to look beautiful.

And why would anyone believe that a campaign funded by the actual people who profit from such things would be able to be objective ??