At first glance, a new study about kids’ television viewing habits seems rather encouraging. A group of 1,055 3-12 year-olds was shown three different pictures of a popular female cartoon character, Bibi Blocksburg (the apparent love-child of Mickey Mouse in his Sorcerer’s Apprentice days and Caillou the inexplicably bald-headed Canadian preschooler):
The pictures were set up Goldilocks style with the first showing Bibi too thin, the second normal and the third overweight. 70% of both the boys and the girls picked the normal image of Bibi as their favorite. Hooray for kids and their untarnished self-image, right?
I have a few questions about this study. First, it was conducted in Germany. Bibi is apparently a very popular character in Germany as evidenced by her sold-out line of Bibi bedding. So I’m guessing that all the kids in the study had seen her before – probably ad nauseum if they are as enamored of the TV as my kids are – and picked the image that looked most like what they were used to.
Second, again, this study was conducted in Germany. This could perhaps be an American misconception but my impression during the time I spent in Germany and in Europe is that people of all ages there are kinder to women’s bodies there than we are state side. True there were as many, if not more, sexualized images of women on display there but people just seemed less critical. Or perhaps it was just that my language skills were rudimentary and so I had about a 10-minute lag following a conversation. (True story: I once was in a conversation with a Spanish woman for a good 10 minutes before I realized she was telling me about her recent miscarriage. And I’d been grinning and nodding the whole time like an idiot.) So yes, Europe gave us this:
The new trend for fall: Nonexistant thighs. You can’t really stand anymore so better brush up on your leaning skills. Photo CreditBut still, I think German children – with their ridiculously adorable “GU-ten TAG” – have a leg up on American kids when it comes to a healthy view of women’s bodies. To test out my theory, I ran my own study. Seeing as I only have three kids, it had a pretty small sample size. Two technically, since the baby doesn’t really talk much. Anyhow, I showed cartoon pics of various female body sizes to my 4- and 6-year-old boys and asked them which they liked the best. The 4-year-old answered promptly, “Which ones are the bad guys? I like them.”
I sighed and tried not to contaminate my study by answering, “I don’t know, which one do you think is the best bad guy?” (Note: everyone is a “guy” or a “him” to my 4-year-old. I’d worry about his language skills except that he lives with all boys save for me and everyone knows that moms are not girls, duh.)
He frowned for a minute and said, “There aren’t any good bad guys. None of them have guns.” And then he walked off. That’s research on children for you.
The six-year-old was a little more helpful. At first he shrugged and squirmed and refused to pick one but then he finally pointed at a Bratzz-like character with itty bitty waist, big lips and ginormous feet. “Why her?” I asked, trying not to feel like a failure as a mother.
“I dunno,” he answered, “she just looks like what the girls at my school like. They have her all over their folders and stuff. So she’s probably the best one.”
So my boy liked the girl character that his first-grade girl friends liked the best. And the first-grade girls apparently preferred an icon who would torture and demoralize them later in life with her unrealistic and unattainable standard of beauty.
It starts young folks, it starts young.
What are your thoughts on this study? How do you think American kids would stack up to European kids, body-image wise? Seen any examples of this from the kids in your own life?
ok that true story? SO SOMETHING WHICH WOULD HAPPEN TO ME (and may have given I spent months in a spanish speaking land and spoke only a handful of words).
not much to add here yet as my Tornado is too young and the girls with whom I work in the schools are sadly, horrifyingly stereotypical in their bodylackoflove.
I CLING to the notion that my daughter will emulate me.
and I fear it.
she may LOVE HER BOD but she’ll question her ‘worth’ because her career path is a lowpayingone which simultaneously is a time suck.
🙂
Miz.
It is very sad this culture we live in. My son didn’t want to wear shorts b/c of his legs. What? At age 8 and a boy? You are right, it starts early.
Love this posting. Being an American, living in Europe for almost a year now (yowzers has it been that long?) at first I thought things were vastly different from America (besides the obvious), I felt like people were more tolerant of various races, genders and weights that span the range. The longer I live here, the more I realize that the same indiscretions exist as in America.
I have no children of my own, so I have no authority to give that perspective. However, I do now and then get some children for clients and they are always talking about some various model that they idolize for their beauty, fame and luster. Its a strange feeling when your two worlds collide.
The similarities among people of different cultures are really more than the differences. Like it or not, it’s become a small, small world, and the folks at Disney have had to drastically enlarge the seats 🙁
Good parenting, as you guys demonstrate is probably the best hope we have.
So your study would show that whatever girls like, boys will like. Ergo if we start plastering GOOD role models everywhere with real bodies boys will like them best!
Actually, I DO think that there’s some truth to this. If a woman complains about her body to a man, what’s he supposed to do? When supposed flaws are being pointed out to him day after day he’s going to assume that those things are “bad” and not like them after a while. Therefore we need to celebrate our flaws.
I think you’re also right that Europeans are in general much more forgiving than Americans… then again, there’s a whole lot of tall and thin Europeans. And I must admit that I have come across many people in Europe who were NOT forgiving (my house mother in Spain frequently pointed out people who she thought were “fat” and so on… I was pretty horrified by it).
I must say this is (another) reason I try to shelter my sons from a lot of the media. We don’t own a TV and don’t have cable, so I have A LOT of control over what they see. They can watch movies on the computer, but only ones which I’ve approved and bought for them, and play on websites I allow. Some people say I’m too strict and can’t shelter them forever; I say I’m pretty moderate and will shelter them as long as I can.
So I think my sons, right now, at 2 and 4, have good body image and haven’t been witness to too much oversexualization of girls and women, and would probably pick a figure that looked “normal.” The only time I’ve ever heard them comment on someone’s size was to my mom, but that was because SHE always talked about how she is fat (and she’s not really overweight, just not fit), so my 4-yo repeated it. I couln’t get mad at him, so tried to talk to *her* about how that was inappropriate. It didn’t work.
Oh, and here (on the Mexico border) a lot of people don’t speak English. I know a little Spanish, but as soon as someone starts talking to me, my mind goes blank, and I can’t use any of it, so I would have been just like you. If I’m overhearing someone else’s conversation, I can understand a lot, but speak to me in Spanish, and nothing.
There were little girls (younger than 10) at my gym the other day getting changed from the pool and they were singing the Katie Perry song “I kissed a girl” and it made my heart break because they’re way to little to be idolizing people who are “bisexual for one night” to get attention.
As far as body image and children I don’t have any experience…but when I heard that my niece (who is 3) was encouraged (by her grandfather) to laugh at the little boy in her class who cries a lot – I was furious! As a crybaby myself growing up, it was very hard to keep my emotions in, and I was made fun of for that. I only hope that he doesn’t start encouraging her to make fun of those who are shaped differently than her.
Oh, and please, please, please include more posts of your kids – they sound adorable!!
Uh… isn’t that model missing a large section of her right leg? You’re right – she SHOULD have trouble standing. There’s literally a huge chunk missing. It’s quite distressing.
I’m from Europe, but I can’t say I had what I would consider a ‘normal’ childhood, so I can’t really offer much as far as formative influences are concerned. I do think America is more obsessed with image. Much more obsessed. These are observations of an adult that’s lived in both places.
That’s not to say that kids in Europe aren’t going to be influenced by American popular culture and imagery in this modern age.
Ultimately, most children are going to end up having access to essentially the same media and images as any other child through the wonder of the internet. This has huge implications. I first had unfettered access to the internet when I was 16. That was when perhaps five percent of US households had a connection. Now? The internet is ubiquitous. I’m not sure it’s even possible to limit access to it in many situations.
Ha!! I didn’t even notice her thigh was missing!! You are hilarious! I can’t stop laughing!
I agree that Americanisation IS inevitably an issue in Europe but I don’t for a second believe that the poor body image (which does exist, rampantly, if you ever get to go and stay in Paris for a bit you’ll see what I mean) is a direct consequence of some kind of cultural imperialism from the States. It has been here forever, it is as old as the hills. The warped media messages are just tapping into and exacerbating what’s already there if you peel back the surface layer.
I completely agree that it needs to be addressed, in every country.
The Bratz doll incident is scary! Like Sagan says, boys are going to start absorbing this distorted idea of the perfect female body until they genuinely DO find it attractive.
TA x
Your post at Cranky Fitness was very funny. Anyway, I don’t know a lot of European kids so I can’t compare. But the onset of poor self image in this country starts way early. I remember teaching a preschool lesson a few years back about respecting our bodies. I asked the 3-4 year olds why we exercise. “So we don’t get fat!” was the immediate response from one little girl. I was floored. She even stood up and started pinching her baby fat around the waist and thighs and complaining about how she looked.
My daughter is 7 and the other day she came home crying that she hated her face because she wasn’t pretty. She said she knew she was a good person on the inside, but didn’t look nice on the outside. I probed and found that she thought her face was round (not oval like everyone else’s) and she could see freckles and pores on her nose (she assumed no one else had those.) We talked about it until she seemed to feel better, but I don’t know if our conversation had any real or lasting impact.
I assumed she got this from listening to kids at school complain about themselves, but when I asked if the other kids felt the same way about their faces, she said no. In her mind, everyone else liked themselves, but she didn’t like herself. (I assure you no one in our home goes around complaining about pores, freckles, face shapes or any other aspect of body image.)
This is the same daughter who kept telling me I was fat because I didn’t look like the covers of my workout DVDs and the magazine models at the Target checkout counter. (Yes, we had the conversation about computer enhancement after that.) She can spout off what we taught her about how physical appearances don’t matter, about how wonderful her dad and I think she is, how everyone has different talents and abilities. I just don’t think it sinks in. I have to admit a part of me is terrified what her internal dialogue will be 10 years from now if she is upset about her face at age 7.
If you were to ask my kids what makes a person fat, they will probably tell you “they ate too much candy,” or “they don’t exercise.” It’s simplistic, and I learned, too simplistic. I unknowingly was in on this experiment when my kids were playing a Tinkerbell matching game. One of the characters (a guy) is big (or fat, if you wish). They were talking amongst themselves about which of the characters they like and dislike and one of my daughter’s said she didn’t like him. I chimed in to ask why. “Because he’s fat,” she said. I about fell out of my chair. Horrified. In all of my–what I hoped was–good role modeling how did she come up with that? I’ve tried to stay on the positive about what you can do to be *healthy* not *skinny,* and yet somehow she’s now descriminating based on weight. Ugh. There was a lot of talking after that. More introspection to come on myself. Can I blame the million or so Barbie’s we have around here? We do not own a single Bratz doll!
In our house, “Fat” is as much a curse word as the famous 4 letter ones unless it applies to the less-than-lean cut of meat on their plates. I truly believe that WE parents are very much culpable in this image crisis. We complain about our bodies, buy magazines w/ perfectly airbrushed bodies on them, watch TV shows where a size 6woman is considered portly, and buy our children those perfect Barbies wearing very skimpy clothing. What they see in school or in the store is one thing, but when mom and dad get caught up in it too, it just makes everything seem okay. We really need to make a concerted effort to protect our kids from these false body images and expose them to the smorgasbord that is the human body. It’s a tough thing to do, and in order to do it, we have to fix our own views first…and that, may be the toughest job of all.