Body image - Mums passing body anxieties on to daughters

[Rosietinted]

I'm working on a project about body image and how anxieties about how we look are passed form mothers to daughters. I'd like to hear from mums who have a daughter who is beginning to display signs of body image awareness at a young age.

I'm really interested in the following:
Do you have a body hang-up?
Are you concerned about passing your body worries on to your daughter?
Has your daughter come home from school saying she is fat or unhappy with the way she looks? If so what steps have you taken to make sure negative messages aren?t being reinforced at home.

Would this be better listed on Feminism or somewhere more serious? We are a pretty shallow handbag loving, waxing inclined lot on this topic!

A very worthwhile project imo. I think you could post it in several sections and then compare the results from all of them -- try teenagers, behaviour and development, relationships (or does MN allow this?)

From my personal experience you would get very different answers from posters on S&B to those on feminism - they are a fierce lot over there!

I post on both.

I have body hang ups although since having dd they have eased MASSIVELY. Maybe that old cliche of body doing something amazing?
I had disordered eating as a teen.
So now I worry more about passing my still slightly odd eating patterns onto dd rather than my body hang ups.
She is only 13 months so has shown no body hatred yet but it is something I think about and hope to be able to deal with.

Having heard what seemed like endless comments about my appearance as a child I have tried to avoid mentioning my DCs' appearance and have tried to focus instead on having conversations with them about topics they are in interested in instead of the first non-sequiteur (sp?) that popped into my head about their hair or clothes or whatever. I'm convinced from many recollections from my childhood and from hearing many cringeworthy comments she has made to the DDs in particular (no comments about appearance ever addressed to DS) that my mother suffered/ suffers from body dysmorphia.

I had to sit her down and request that she not mention needing to lose five pounds, ever, in the presence of the children (a default remark of hers), not make any remarks whatsoever on whether the DDs were looking pretty, etc., what she thought of their clothes, who in the family they resembled, how she thought she herself looked on any given day, how she wasn't going to eat anything the next day after what she considered a large meal the night before... All sorts of remarks that made me go when I heard them again after a break of a few years when I lived too far from her for regular visits.

Agree with pommedechocolat. I feel better about my body having had dd, after years of loathing/using unhealthy methods to keep weight down. I certainly picked up a certain amount of body loathing from my own mother and worked really hard to try and be a positive role model for 4 year old dd.

I exercise a lot and want to her see that ladies CAN sweat and be feminine! I eat healthily but include treats and want her to understand that as long as you eat well and understand what a sensible portion is, that you can enjoy your food and eat a wide range of it. We cook together and talk about looking and being 'healthy' - NOT slim, or thin, or fat. Most kids know instinctively from an early age what that means. They know when someone is really too big, or unhealthily thin. I think human beings are programmed to, but we sometimes override that with all the overly skinny images from magazines - and with lots of overweight people around us all the time.

I have a hangup about my legs and it bugs me that I kind of can't get over it. I know it annoys my dh too as he doesn't think there's a problem with them. ok on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is cameron diaz's legs and 1 is a particularly gnarly tree trunk, I suppose I must be a 5, tho most days I think I'm a 3. Hubby probably thinks I'm a 6 or 7. But the bottom line is, it's stopped me completely from showing them in clothes, like completely. And no I so don't want to pass that on to my 8 year old daughter, who's very interested in bodies and clothes etc. But I never talk to her about it so she'd never be aware of it, unless she started asking herself why I'm never in a knee length thing in summer.

I exercise a lot and she sees me doing that but on the other hand, she has an incredibly sweet tooth and because (like me) she's not sporty by nature, I really have to make sure she's getting enough exercise or she'll start putting pounds on. I don't say that though, I just try and reinforce with her that she needs to eat a healthy diet with proteins, fruit, veg, grains etc and go easy on the muck. I think I overemphasise the whole healthy eating thing, though I stop short of telling her if she doesn't rein it in, she'll put too much on. Again, dh thinks I overdo it. I dunno, does anyone else find the whole weight thing with kids a minefield? :(
It's a good topic anyway...

Thanks for your messages I will post elsewhere to see what other results I get. I'm interested that around age 6, 7, 8 there seems to be a moment that girls pick up these things maybe from school, friends, having more general awareness or mimicking others behaviour...? I'm also interested in how mums react to this. Do you think there is an age or watershed moment I could focus on?