Boosting body image: Tips to talking with teens

In part two of a special series on “Today,” called "Listen to Me. I’m Your Mother,” the focus is on adolescent girls, body image and how mothers can encourage their daughters to like what they see in the mirror. Nancy Etcoff is a professor at Harvard Medical School, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and the author of “Survival of the Prettiest.” She was invited to share some tips for discussing body image with daughters on “Today.” Here’s more from Dr. Etcoff:

The body talk: five tips for moms
Courtney’s mom had called, sounding frantic. Her daughter, a former straight A student, was suddenly reluctant to go to school, and was manufacturing one excuse after another to stay home. She had started smoking, barely ate, and spent most of her time sulking in her room. Although mother and daughter had always been close, the two could not seem to manage a meaningful conversation, or anything beyond accusations and eye rolling. They wanted to come in to see me together, to see if they could jump-start a dialogue and get to the bottom of Courtney’s unhappiness. I will often see moms and daughters together for a few sessions although I work intensively with only one of them. But mothers and daughters share a bond like no other, and a mother who is able to really hear her daughter, to listen empathetically, can have a positive and powerful lifelong impact on her daughter’s well being.

A few days later, Courtney and her mother, Susan, were in my waiting room. Courtney was a beautiful, doe-eyed girl with long dark hair and a rueful smile. Her face was open and expressive; her body held secrets, carefully hidden behind a baggy sweat shirt and oversized jeans. Susan was attractive and slim and looked much younger than her 40 years. Their bodies were facing away from each other, but there was one hopeful sign: They were holding hands.

Courtney’s real conflict was not with her mom but with girls at school, and most of all, with her changing body — her broadening hips and thighs, her added weight. In the school locker room, one girl had held up Courtney’s pants and in the meanest mean girl tone said, “You actually wear these? I could fit two of me in here!” This was the final straw. Since then, Courtney had been doing everything she could to lose weight, including taking up smoking, dieting, and even purging food secretly, and doing everything she could to avoid school until she was thin. “But why haven’t you told me this?" Her mother asked. “This is the one thing you just don’t get,” Courtney answered. “You just tell me to hang around with different girls, or you say that looks don’t matter. Well, they do. Otherwise, why are you always on a diet? If we can’t have an honest conversation, why bother?”

Of course, Courtney’s mom did get it, and other moms do too. They are also living with the same unrealistic and unattainable beauty ideals as their daughters. Insecurity about appearance has become a cultural norm, in fact, a global norm. Eating disorders are occurring in girls at younger and younger ages, but they are also showing up for the first time in women in their 40s and 50s. How can girls and women learn to embrace their own inner and unique beauty? Some answers emerge in the conversations in my office with mothers and daughters, and answers also come from talking to and listening to women around the world, something I have had the privilege to do through my work with the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty and the two ground-breaking global research surveys the brand has commissioned.

Resources for Moms and Daughters The National Women's Health Information Center National Eating Disorders Association Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty: Inside the Campaign

The first study revealed this stunning statistic: Only 2 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 64 felt comfortable describing themselves as beautiful. Although virtually no one thought they looked beautiful, almost everyone felt enormous pressure to be so, and that pressure started early. More than half of women around the world said they first became aware of the need to be physically attractive between the ages of 6 and 17. Fueled by these results, we zeroed in on the impact of beauty ideals on girls ages 15 to 17 in the second study,  “Beyond Stereotypes: Rebuilding the Foundation of Beauty Beliefs — A Global Report.” We also looked specifically for potentially positive influences on a girl’s self esteem and body image. We knew from the first study that many women felt that the media could have harmful effects; what we didn’t know was who might empower girls and women.

Here is what we found: The two earliest and most powerful influences on girl’s feelings about beauty and body image are her mother and her girlfriends. They are much more powerful than magazine ads, the Internet, movies, TV, boys, or any other sources in the girl’s world. And here is the key finding. When we looked at the girls who had the highest self esteem and the most positive body image, we found that those were the girls who listed their moms as their earliest and most powerful influence. Girls who listed their girlfriends had more negative views of their body and lower self-esteem.

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