“Mom, I’m fat!” “I want a smaller stomach.” “I can’t have a cupcake, I want to look good for the prom.”
Our children are struggling with their bodies and specifically their body image.
Parents often assume that the most powerful influences on their children’s body image come from social media, peers, or advertising. While these forces matter, the earliest and most enduring messages are often much closer to home.
While your child might not hear you remind them (repeatedly) to clean up their room, children are listening long before adults realize it. As evidence: I present the child who repeats a cuss you merely uttered under your breath while driving in traffic. They absorb the sigh in front of the mirror. The comment about needing to “be good” after dessert. The praise directed toward someone who has lost weight. The casual joke about earning a meal through exercise. These remarks are woven into daily life, passed down through generations, often spoken automatically.
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Here’s the part most parents don’t want to hear, and it’s also the part I have the most hope about. The body talk at home is shaping the lens through which your child sees their own body. When appearance is a frequent topic, kids learn that bodies are projects to manage. When food is described in moral terms, they learn that eating is a test of character. When adults criticize themselves out loud, children learn that self-surveillance is normal, and eventually, required.
And the hopeful part is that you are the most powerful influence. Not the algorithm. Not the friend group. You.
A note on language before we go further.
I’m going to use the word pattern a lot in this article, instead of habit. I do that on purpose. A habit sounds like something you’re stuck with, something you’re destined to repeat. A pattern is just something you’ve practiced a lot. Your comments about bodies, your reactions to food, your relationship with the mirror, these are patterns. Which means they can be noticed, and gently shifted, with a new practice.
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Start by noticing.
You can’t change what you haven’t noticed yet. So before anything else, just pay attention for a few days. How often do bodies come up in your house, and in what tone? Is “you look great” the first compliment out of your mouth? Do you comment when someone loses or gains weight? Does frustration with your own body leak into the kitchen, the car, the mirror in the hallway?
Most parents in my Family in Focus eating disorder prevention practice are stunned by what they catch themselves saying once they start listening. The noticing itself is where the change begins.
You don’t have to stop talking about bodies. It’s time we talk about the whole story.
If bodies are only ever discussed in hushed or critical tones, your child will fill in the gaps with whatever the internet hands them. What helps is grounded, matter-of-fact language about what bodies actually do. Bodies move us, carry us, let us hug the people we love, let us think and create and rest. Bodies change throughout our lives, through illness, growth, puberty, pregnancy, aging, and everything in between. Appearance is one small sliver of a much larger story. It’s time we talk about the whole story.
Food is not a moral category.
We talk about food in moral terms constantly, and most of us don’t even notice we’re doing it. We call foods good or bad. We talk about earning dessert. We say we’re being good today, or we’ve been bad this weekend. Kids pick this up fast, and it sticks. When food is framed as a reward, it carries emotional weight it shouldn’t have to carry. When food is framed as virtuous, it becomes a measure of worth. Over time, this is how children lose touch with the hunger and fullness cues they were born with.
The shift is smaller than parents expect. Try describing food the way you’d describe weather or music. Notice what it tastes like, how the texture feels in your mouth, what your body feels like after you eat it. Warm. Crunchy. Filling. Satisfying. Not enough. Too much for right now. This is the vocabulary of someone who eats intuitively, and it’s the vocabulary your child came in with, before we taught them a different one.
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You do not have to love your body to do this work.
I want to say this as plainly as I can, because I think it’s where most parents freeze. You don’t have to wake up tomorrow with a healed relationship to your body. You don’t have to stand in front of the mirror and mean every nice thing you say. It is completely normal to see your body as a collection of parts, some you don’t notice, some you’ve been at war with since middle school, some you’d change if you could. It’s normal to compare yourself to other people. It’s normal to have a day where your jeans feel wrong and the whole morning tilts.
What I’d offer you to notice is that the discomfort isn’t actually coming from the body part. It’s coming from the comparison, the focus, the story you’ve been handed about what that body part is supposed to mean. That’s the thing you’re working with. Not the thigh, not the stomach, not the arm. The lens.
And here’s what’s important for your kids. They don’t need a parent who has figured it all out. They need a parent who is honest about being a person in a body, in a culture that’s been pretty unkind to bodies, who is choosing to build a real relationship with theirs instead of just criticizing it. You can say out loud, “I’ve heard a lot of rough things about bodies in my life. I’m still untangling some of it. I’m working on being kinder to mine.” That sentence, said once, is more powerful than a decade of “I love my body!” that your child can tell you don’t mean.
Modeling honesty and growth is modeling.
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Puberty will test all of this.
Bodies change fast and unevenly during puberty. Weight gain before a growth spurt, shifting proportions, acne, new curves, new density. If your child senses alarm from you during this window, they will read their own body as a problem. If they sense calm, they will read it as a phase. Curiosity is protective. Scrutiny most definitely is not.
The phone is not the enemy. Silence about the phone is.
You can’t filter everything, and trying to will exhaust you both. What works better is ongoing, low-key conversation. What did you see today that made you feel weird? Why do you think this account keeps showing up? Have you noticed how certain bodies get promoted and others don’t? You’re not trying to control the feed. You’re helping them build a filter inside their own head.
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Watch your compliments.
Even positive appearance-based compliments keep appearance at the center of a child’s identity. Praise the effort, the kindness, the stubbornness, the way they stuck with something hard. When a child’s sense of worth has many legs to stand on, body dissatisfaction has fewer places to take root.
This is social-emotional learning, applied to the body.
We’ve done a good job, culturally, of accepting that kids need to learn how to name their feelings, sit with discomfort, regulate when they’re flooded, repair after conflict, and stay connected to themselves and others through hard moments. We call that social-emotional learning and we teach it in schools.
We have not, as a culture, applied any of those same skills to the body.
But that’s exactly what a healthy relationship with a body actually is. Noticing a feeling about your stomach without immediately acting on it. Sitting with the discomfort of a body that’s changing. Regulating the wave of comparison when it hits in the mirror or on the feed. Repairing with yourself after a hard body day. Staying connected to what your body is telling you about hunger, fullness, rest, movement.
We build better relationships with our bodies by developing the social-emotional skills to be in them, at every age, every stage, every size, every appearance. That’s the work. And it’s the work you’re modeling every time you catch yourself mid-sigh, every time you choose curiosity over criticism, every time you let a meal be a meal.
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This starts with you, not them.
Most of the parents who find their way to me are carrying their own unresolved history with food, with their bodies, with being the kid who was weighed at the doctor’s office and remembered the number for twenty-five years. That history doesn’t stay quiet. It comes out in the offhand comment, the raised eyebrow at the second helping, the way you dress for a family photo. Prevention doesn’t start when your child says “I’m fat.” It starts when you’re willing to look honestly at what you were handed and decide what stops with you.
Your child is going to grow up in a weight-obsessed culture no matter what you do. What you can shape is the internal voice that interprets it. When that voice was built at a kitchen table where bodies were respected, food was allowed to just be food, and the adults were doing their own honest work out loud, your child walks into the world with something sturdier than confidence. They walk in with trust in themselves.
Try describing food the way you'd describe weather or music. Notice what it tastes like, how the texture feels in your mouth, what your body feels like after you eat it.
