Ep. 34 Your Child's Body Image: The Most Important Thing You Can Do

[gentle music] I'll often hear questions come up from concerned parents wanting their children to have a positive relationship with their body.

Questions like, "What do I say or do if my child comes to me and says, 'I'm fat,' or, "I'm ugly'"? Or, "How do I stop them hating their body?" Those are totally understandable questions.

Sometimes words help, but I think we also know that we can sense when someone's just saying words to us versus when there's a real energy or groundedness to what they're saying.

So I really don't think finding the right words or saying the right thing or, quote-unquote, "wrong thing," is where we need to look.

What I think we need to do instead is turn it around back onto ourselves, often the thing that sometimes can feel a little bit harder, and look at our own relationship with our body first, particularly our own reactions if our children come and say those things to us.

And surprisingly, I think this can take some pressure off of us of having to do it right or find the right words to say.

When we turn it around and deal with our own internal state, the thoughts that are coming up within us, the emotional reactions that we're having, what's gonna happen is how we interact with our children and what we say is gonna change.

It's gonna come from a much more healed place.

Because many of us have had the experience of growing up in households where our parents were really concerned with their bodies and did not like their bodies and were on diets, or people who were important to us in our life.

So when we can do this work ourselves, we automatically are breaking that generational chain so we're not passing it on or as intensely as we received it when we were children.

If you're listening to this episode, already I want you to give yourself some credit and take a breath, because it means that you're paying attention.

It means that you care, that you want to do things differently, and already that is making a difference in what you're relaying to your child in terms of how they are relating to their body.

If you weren't aware, then you wouldn't really be able to make a difference, and you are.

Awareness is where the change begins and where the healing begins.

You might have heard me say this before in other episodes.

Children are not born ashamed of their bodies.

If you can go back to remembering your children when they were two, three, four years old, you can see that these beliefs and insecurities that we end up having about our bodies are learned.

They come from the greater culture around us.

We know we can't completely control the messages that they're receiving, but what we can do is control what we are saying to them.

We are the ones who have the most impact and influence.

That matters and makes a difference.

But what we can also do is help them to learn to question what they're hearing, and that starts with questioning and becoming aware of our own beliefs first.