What’s the best way for parents to help their children have a healthy relationship with food?
For generations parents have been telling their children to finish everything on their plate. Does that need to stop?
Don’t Make Your Kids Clean their Plates
How much is social media to blame?
Study: Social media triggers children to dislike their own bodies
People start developing unhealthy perceptions of their own bodies in early childhood, a new study suggests.
Kids as young as 7 start to judge their bodies in ways that eventually could lead to an eating disorder, researchers report in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
“It has been clear for many years that we need to be wary about visual media which present only a narrow range of bodies, because this affects adults’ body perceptions,” lead researcher Lynda Boothroyd, a professor of psychology at Durham University in the U.K., said in a news release.
“Now we know that’s true for children, too,” she continued. “Even very neutral images can adjust their ideas about what is heavy or thin if they see enough of the same kind of body.”
Unrealistic body images can foster negative self-assessment, causing people to strive for “perfection,” the Mental Health Foundation says. This can lead to eating and mood disorders.
