Your self-image and your parenting
By Marlene Jones
The things on our bodies that make people self-conscious, according to those who have studied such individuals, could be imagined or real, big or small, but they all have a way of detracting from an individual’s body-image.
The balding spot or the body and facial hair that doesn’t seem to fit popular standards. The slightly malformed ear, or the nose that doesn’t “comply” with the dominant culture. The stretchmarks that take residence only too often after a shift in weight, like during pregnancy or other weight gain, or a reoccurring zit in the middle of one’s forehead. The non-existent “six-pack” abdominal muscles or the wide hips that don’t seem to behave when one is shopping for a new pair of jeans…The list goes on.
But when it comes to children, the list need not go on, it could be cut short by mindful parents and caretakers. It doesn’t always happen that way, however.
Parents’ Role
Experts say that parents and other adults most often contribute to the negative body image and self-esteem of
the children around them. Most often, they pass along their own insecurities to the children.
“Your children pay attention to what you say and do, even if it doesn’t seem like it sometimes,” note child experts at the National Women’s Health Center (NWHC), in the nation’s capital. “If you are always complaining about your weight or feel pressure to change your body shape, your children may learn that these are
important concerns.”
Consequently parents with positive body images influence their children to be the same. NWHC in a report on body image, explains that children pick up on comments about regular image problems that can affect children, especially girls, as they enter their teen years. These can impact their habits in potentially unhealthy ways. They include:
* having parents, mostly mothers, concerned about their own weight or image;
* having parents who are overly concerned about their children’s weight and looks;
* natural weight gain and other body changes during puberty;
* peer pressure to look a certain way;
* struggles with self-esteem; and
* media images showing the “ideal” female or male body as a certain prototype.
Girls and even boys with parents who are overly concerned with their supposed image problems may actually resort to extreme measures to fix those supposed problems. When it comes to weight concerns, NWHC notes that actions such as skipping meals or taking diet pills can take precedent and for some, extreme efforts to lose weight can lead to eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia. For others, the pressure to be thin
can actually lead to binge eating disorder, which is overeating that is followed by extreme guilt. What’s more, girls are more likely to further risk their health by trying to lose weight in unhealthy ways, such as
smoking.
“While not as common, boys are also at risk of developing unhealthy eating habits and eating disorders. Body image becomes an important issue for teenage boys as they struggle with body changes and pay more attention to media images of the ‘ideal’ muscular male,” according to NWHC.
“A Girl Like Me”
For blacks specifically, the topic of negative self-body imagery has always been less discussed. It however, came full circle last summer when 17- year-old Kiri Davis, a Harlem, N.Y. student, revisited a decades-old
study in which two dolls, one black and one white, were used to determine how black children felt about themselves. The dolls were identical in every way except in their complexions.
Below is the essence of the 8-minute short film by Davis titled “A Girl Like Me.”
“Can you show me the doll that looks bad?” asks a friendly female voice. A preschool-aged black girl promptly
picks up the black doll to show.
“And why does that look bad?” asks the female voice again. “Because she’s black.”
“And why is this the nice doll?” the voice prods. “Because she’s white.”
“And can you give me the doll that looks like you?” requests the owner of the female voice. The little girl hesitates momentarily before handing over the black doll.
The children in “A Girl Like Me,” all between ages 4 and 5, are from a Harlem day care center and 15 of the 21 black children asked the above questions preferred the white doll over the black one.
At the heart of the first test and Davis’ film was the notion that lighter skin is better than darker skin. Davis said in a televised ABC interview in October that complexion is a recurring image theme among fellow students.
Davis’ film was the updated version of a 1950s doll test used by psychologists Kenneth B. Clark and his wife Mamie Phipps Clark that showed how racial segregation destroyed the self-esteem and body image of black children. It sought to help make the case for desegregation in the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education
U.S. Supreme Court decision that ultimately outlawed racial segregation in public schools.
The results Clark documented are the same results Davis’ film document, much to the chagrin of black parents and others.
Syndicated commentator Leonard Pitts is one of the chagrined. In a column last fall, he writes: “How is
this possible? How can this still be true? How in the hell, a lifetime after a little boy in Arkansas pointed to the black doll and said, ‘That’s a nigger . . . I’m a nigger,’ can we still have black children who think black
and bad are synonymous? “Some of us were born of the generation that came of age with a mandate to hurl that thinking back onto history’s trash heap. Some of us remember when James Brown sang ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.’ Some of us knew that when Aretha Franklin spelled out ‘Respect’, she wasn’t
just talking to a feckless lover. Some of us piled Afros high on our heads and sprayed them with Afro Sheen till they shone. Some of us clenched our fists and cried ‘Black is Beautiful’ in the face of a nation that had
always told us you could be one or the other, but never both.
“And for what? So that 40 years later, our children would still parrot media-derived lies of their own worthlessness? What’s appalling is that many of the lies now originate with black people themselves.”
Pitts says the media images to which children are exposed bear much of the blame. The images portrayed on mainstream TV, for example, tend to show either whites or blacks who are closer to the white, mainstream
standard of beauty. Black-oriented TV also shows that same black person, often with modifications, including the occasional blue or green eyes, the long straightened, sometimes blonde hair and the nose, ala entertainers Lil’ Kim and Michael Jackson.
“A new generation, afflicted with historical amnesia, blind indifference and a worship of filthy lucre, dances a metaphoric buck and wing, eyes rolling, yassuh bossing, selling itself out, selling its forebears out. Most
of all, selling the children out,” according to Pitts.
Esther Dolla, a Mechanicsville, Va. eighth grade student, says that among her school and classmates, complexion is just one piece of the whole body image puzzle. She says that body shape and weight, brand name clothes, popular gadgets such as iPods, having a socalled “pretty face,” and even having or
lacking an “attitude” also contribute heavily to students’ self image.
“They can really make someone feel unimportant,” she says. “It can get on someone’s nerves.”
Leona’s Story
Leona Phillips, 31, says that at the very beginning of her freshman year in high school, she would have gladly traded in multiple body parts in her desire to be someone else. Her main desire was to look like TV’s “Saved by the Bell” star Lark Voorhies. She wanted Voorhies’ long black hair with its brown shimmery streaks, her
straight and narrow nose, somewhat thin lips and slender, petite physique.
“I always thought she was so pretty,” says Phillips, a mother of one son. “I always wondered how it was that she was black and still look so…white…so beautiful. “I really wanted to be her.”
Phillips, who lives in Henrico County, Va., remembers that she was experiencing ridicule from her schoolmates because of her unmistakable Afrocentric features, including her dark skin, “kinky” and “nappy” hair, a broad flat nose, full lips, larger than average breasts, thighs and wider hips than most of her classmates.
“There were girls who used to call me ‘tar girl’ or make fun of my hair because it was not straightened. I remember these two black girls who were always terrorizing me telling me sarcastically that with curls like
mine, everyone envied me.”
The torture went on through high school and Phillips shares that after graduation when she met the young man who became her first boyfriend, she was so eager for compliments, she became a clingy girlfriend.
“I couldn’t get over the fact that he actually liked me. When I met him, I had just convinced my mother to let me straighten my hair, but that was the only thing I could change,” says the Guyana native, who now
admits that she was suffering from low self-esteem and a self-loathing image of herself.
When she became pregnant within a year of her graduation, Phillips says she knew she had to refocus her priorities.
“Being pregnant brought me back to earth— I had to stop spending hours in front of the mirror and figure out how I was going to raise a child. I was barely 19, and I had to figure something out, especially when it became clear that I was going to be a single parent. “Being a mother has been the biggest
influencer for me to love me as I am, and to love my child as he is.”
She no longer considers straight hair a beauty necessity and she doesn’t think she needs plastic surgery to “fix” her nose or slim her hips.
Help
So how can improvements be made to counter negative body images?
Extreme measures such as plastic surgery aside, researchers like those at the Melpomene Institute in Minneapolis, MN say that participation in sports is one of the best body image enhancers, especially for
children. In a 1995 study and in consequent ones, researchers have found that youth, especially, those who play on higher numbers of sports teams have better body images, compared to those who play on few
or no teams. Physical activity per se however, is not a good indicator of body image, according to researchers.
Apart from sports participation, the content of parental comments is also critical in determining body image. Body image scores of youth who receive negative comments from parents are much worse than the scores of those who receive positive comments. Overall, youth with high body images tend not to look outside themselves to define their body images; inwardly they are able to generate feelings of self worth, which extend to their physical appearances.
Experts say that the simple question “how do I look” can say a lot about someone, both adult and child. It’s a question that to some, could be as fleeting as time spent having fun, or as enduring as one’s skin color. But it is a good indicator of self worth.
