Body Image

A mother is in a shop changing room with her nine-year-old daughter, who is trying on a pair of jeans. Over the last six months the girl has started to look at herself differently. Half-watching, the mother says without thinking, “They look nice, they make your legs look longer.” Her daughter looks at her in the mirror for a moment too long, then turns and asks, in a flat voice, whether her legs are short.

The mother says no. She also realises, with a sinking feeling, that she has just said what her own mother used to say in changing rooms in 1991, and that without meaning to, she has passed something on.

Some version of this comes up often in our work at the practice. Almost always, a parent realises she has been having a conversation about her child’s body only after she has had it: the remark in the changing room, the comment about clothes that don’t suit her, the diet talk at the dinner table that her daughter has overheard for years and, at nine, is starting to use about herself.

What is actually happening

For the first ten years of her life, a child’s body image is made almost entirely of what she has heard the adults around her say about bodies: hers, their own and other people’s. A six-year-old has no views about her own thighs except the ones she has overheard, and by ten she has begun to think of those views as her own. The popular view is that unease about the body starts with social media in adolescence. Clinically, it starts long before that, in the kitchens, changing rooms and bathrooms where she has been hearing adults comment on how they look since she could understand language.

The Mental Health Foundation’s research on body image in the UK has been clear for years that body image forms early and stays with a child as she grows up. A significant minority of primary-aged children, more girls than boys but boys too, say they are unhappy with their bodies before they are eleven, and by the early teens the figure rises sharply. The NHS Every Mind Matters pages on body image say the same in language a parent can use, and their guidance on raising body confidence in children is one of the clearest introductions we know of in the UK.

This matters because the usual advice puts the effort in the wrong place. Parents are told the problem is social media and the answer is to limit it. Screens are part of it, and there’s a chapter on them elsewhere in this book. But how a child feels in her own body rests on foundations laid long before she has a phone, in the way people talk at home. Screens amplify what’s already there; in most cases they don’t create it from nothing.

The mirror talk you did not know you were doing

The conversations parents don’t realise they’re having are the ones that shape a child most. There’s the running commentary at the bathroom mirror about looking tired, or older, or having put on weight after Christmas, and the sigh at the new dress that doesn’t work any more. There are remarks about a relative who has let himself go, a celebrity who looks well (polite English code for has lost weight) and the neighbour who hasn’t aged a day. And there’s the diet talk: the new diet, the “I’ll start on Monday”, the calorie-counting at the supermarket, the talk about carbohydrates as if they were a moral question. She has heard all of it. She has heard how the adults in her house talk about bodies in private, with the door open, and at four she is learning the script she will be running in her own bathroom at fourteen.

None of this is about blaming parents. The parents we see didn’t invent this script. They grew up hearing it from their own mothers and fathers, and it has been part of the culture for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. The useful question is who, in your house, decides this year to stop passing it on.

The no-diet-talk rule, and what to do instead

The most useful single change a household can make here is to stop the diet talk at the table. We don’t mean healthy eating, which is a different and easier conversation. We mean the moral language about food and bodies that turns meals into a constant, low-level trial: calling food clean, bad or naughty, and saying “I shouldn’t”, “I’m being good today” or “I’ll have to make up for this tomorrow”. None of it is necessary, and all of it is corrosive to the child watching.

In its place, talk about food and bodies in a slower, more matter-of-fact way. Food is just food and a body is just a body, and neither is being scored. Parents who can keep mealtimes at this lower pitch for a year find, by the end of it, that their children have a calmer relationship with food and with their own bodies than they had at the start. It’s a very slow change, but the direction is clear.

In practice, it comes down to a few moments.

At the mirror, when you feel the urge to say something disparaging about your own body in front of her, don’t say it. Don’t replace it with something forced and positive either; you don’t have to act out a love of your body that you don’t feel. Saying nothing in front of the mirror is the new house rule, and she will notice that the comments have stopped.

In the changing room, the instinct is to comment on whether clothes suit her, flatter her, make her look slimmer or make her legs look longer. Stop using that kind of language altogether, and ask about comfort and whether the clothes feel like her: “Do you like them? Are they comfortable? Do they feel like you?”

At the supermarket, the thing to drop is the talk in the aisles about what is in things, what is better and what is bad. Talk about food in terms of what it does for you: taste, energy, what you feel like, what you’re doing that afternoon. “I want something filling because we’re walking the dog.” “I want something light because it’s hot.”

Then there’s the first time she asks. Most children, somewhere between six and ten, ask the question: “Am I fat?” “Am I too tall?” “Am I the wrong shape?” The instinct is to answer with a vehement no. A calmer answer does more: “No, your body is the body of a nine-year-old, and it’s doing its job. Why are you asking?” The second sentence is the one that matters, because it opens the door to whatever prompted the question. That is almost never just her body; it’s something said, by another child, an adult or an algorithm, that she is trying to make sense of.

The repair when you have already said the thing

If you’re like most parents reading this, you’ve already said the thing: the diet remark, the comment in the changing room, the sigh at the mirror. The script was running for years before you ever stopped to think about it.

The repair is small and needs no ceremony. She doesn’t need a sit-down conversation in which you apologise for thirty years of inherited body talk; that would make her the one hearing your confession, and that isn’t her role. What helps is the new pattern, starting now, without comment: the diet talk stops, and so do the remarks at the mirror. If she mentions the change six months later, you can mention it lightly: “I’ve been trying not to talk about bodies so much. I think I picked it up from my mother, and I don’t want to pass it on.” It’s brief and true, it puts the responsibility in the right place, and it simply tells her about a family value you are deliberately changing.

Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read is the book we keep giving parents at this point. Its chapter on what we pass on without meaning to is the clearest writing we know on why this matters, and on why it isn’t a moral failing to discover, at forty, that you’ve been following a script you didn’t write.

When the picture is more than body unease

Body unease and a clinical eating disorder are not the same thing. Most children pass through phases of body discomfort that do not tip into restrictive behaviour, compulsive exercise, or hidden food rules. Some do tip. If you are seeing the cluster set out in the eating chapter (creeping restriction, weight loss, food hidden or moved, a developing moralistic vocabulary about food, withdrawal from family meals, secret rule-bound exercise, mood flattening alongside changes in eating), the picture has tipped into a different conversation, and the right move is not to wait. BEAT, the UK’s eating disorders charity, is the right specialist line in that conversation; their helpline for England is on 0808 801 0677, Monday to Friday 3pm to 8pm, with separate lines for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The GP is the gateway to NHS routes including the local children’s eating disorder service. Early intervention changes the trajectory. The eating chapter in this book covers that ground in detail.

The body-image conversation in this chapter is the lower-acuity end of that spectrum: a child whose relationship with her body has become uncomfortable, who is making remarks about herself that the parent has not heard before, who is comparing herself to peers or to images online with a frequency that has begun to colour her mood. This is where a parent’s choices at the table and at the mirror make the largest single difference. Where the cluster has crossed into what the eating chapter describes, the response has to broaden, fast.

At different ages

Talking about bodies is different at four, at nine and at fifteen. The bands below are a rough guide: some children come to these conversations earlier than the band suggests, and others later.

If your child is between four and seven. At this age, a child treats her body as an experiment in what she can do: she runs, climbs, dances and falls over. Talk about her body in terms of what it lets her do: strong legs, good climbing arms, fast. Say these as plain facts, not as a self-esteem programme. Don’t make her appearance the first thing you comment on when she comes downstairs in the morning. You look so pretty in that dress teaches her that being looked at is a test she passes or fails. “Are you ready for breakfast?” teaches her nothing of the sort. You can still pay her compliments; just move them from the centre of the conversation to the edge.

If your child is between seven and nine. This is when comparison begins. She’s looking at the other children at school and noticing who is taller, who is faster and who has the right shoes. Take the comparisons she mentions at face value and don’t make more of them: “Yes, Eva is taller than you. She’s been taller since Reception.” Say it calmly, without reassurance that turns it into a competition, and without making her body a project for the family. The school nurse is, in this band, an underused resource; if the child has questions about her growing body that you are not sure how to answer, the school nurse can take the question with calm professional ease, and is the right route for any concern about growth, weight, or puberty that has begun to worry you.

If your child is between nine and eleven. The self-consciousness of the last years before secondary school arrives, often with a small surge of criticism of her own body. She looks in the mirror differently. She asks the am I fat question, or says the less direct version, “I don’t like my legs”. Take the question at face value, answer briefly and stay curious about what lies behind it: “Why do you ask? Did someone say something?” If a particular peer is making remarks, that is a different conversation, and the school’s pastoral lead is the right route. Where a child this age is becoming entrenched in body criticism, your GP is the entry into NHS routes; the GP-to-CAMHS pathway is not only for eating disorders but for any mood concern that has begun to accompany the body talk.

If your child is in early secondary, eleven to thirteen. Among her friends, talk about bodies is now loud, and a lot of it is online. She comes across images, comments and jokes about bodies every day, in a volume the previous generation never did. Two things help at this age. First, keep the way your household talks about bodies low-key and free of moral judgement, with every adult in the house sticking to it. Second, be curious about what she’s seeing, and ask about it indirectly: “I read a thing about TikTok this week. What do you make of how people talk about their bodies on there?” Make it an open question she can take up or leave, not an interrogation. If you haven’t seen the body content she is coming across, ask her to show you on a Sunday afternoon. The five minutes she spends showing you what she watches will tell you more about how she sees her body than an hour of asking.

If your child is in mid to late secondary, thirteen to sixteen. Her independence is real, and it isn’t yours to override. What you can offer is a home where her body isn’t commented on, day to day, by anyone: not by you, not by her other parent, and not by older siblings making the jokes older siblings make. The school nurse remains a useful route for physical-health questions; the school’s pastoral lead and DSL are the right route if you have any reason to suspect that body image has tipped into restrictive eating, self-harm, or distress she has not been able to bring to you. Schools have safeguarding infrastructure for exactly this picture; you are not bypassing your child by raising a concern with the DSL, you are bringing another reliable adult into her support.

If your child is sixteen and beyond. Your conversations are becoming more like those between two adults. At this age, if she asks, you can talk more directly about how you’re working on this yourself: “I’ve been trying not to talk about bodies the way my mother did. I don’t always manage. I’m working on it.” Being honest, briefly, about what you inherited is the example she needs to do the same in her own adult life. The BACP and NCPS therapist directories list counsellors working with young adults on body image and food; if she would benefit from someone outside the family, that is the route.

Boys, and the conversation that gets had less

Body-image work is often aimed at parents of daughters, but clinically the problem is wider than that. Boys are increasingly affected by body comparison, and the algorithms push an ideal of muscle and leanness into their feeds as hard as they push thinness into their sisters’. The Mental Health Foundation’s body-image work says this clearly. The same household rules apply: no comments on his body or anyone else’s, no diet talk, and no talk about muscles that sounds like a verdict. If a son is pursuing leanness and muscle in a way that has tipped into compulsive exercise, restricted eating, or supplement use that worries you, the eating-and-control chapter is where you are, and the BEAT line and the GP route apply equally.

The school, and when to bring it in

Where a body-image picture has tipped into something the parent cannot manage on her own, the school is a partner. The school nurse is the calm first stop for physical-health questions. The pastoral lead or form tutor knows the social weather of the year group and may have noticed things you have not. The Designated Safeguarding Lead (DSL), every UK school has one, is the right adult to bring into the conversation when body image has intersected with anything that has begun to worry you as a safeguarding question: restrictive eating, hidden self-harm, online content directed at the child that has begun to shape how she sees herself. Raising the concern with the DSL is not an escalation that takes the situation out of your hands; it is the partnership that means another professional adult, in the building she is in five days a week, knows what to watch for and how.

The longer arc

A child makes peace with her body slowly, over decades. You don’t have to finish that for her before she leaves home. What you can do, at the very least, is make sure the adults in the house haven’t actively got in its way. The remarks you don’t make at the mirror, the diet talk you don’t have and the running commentary you don’t give add up, year after year, to a different upbringing from the one you had yourself.

The mother in the changing room, who said the wrong sentence and noticed, has already done the most important thing this chapter can ask of her, which is to notice. What counts now is the next sentence she doesn’t say, and standing at the mirror next week, in front of her daughter, without sighing.

You can be the parent who decides not to pass this on. That is the most useful thing this chapter has to tell you.

NOTES

1. Perry, Philippa. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did). Penguin Life, 2019. Perry’s account of the rupture-and-repair cycle and the practice of catching ourselves in our own reactivity.

Where to go further

Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) We mention this book earlier in the chapter. It’s the clearest writing we know on the patterns parents pass on without meaning to, and on how a parent can recognise and stop an inheritance she was never given the chance to refuse.

Signe Darpinian, Wendy Sterling and Shelley Aggarwal, Raising Body Positive Teens A therapist, a dietitian and an adolescent medicine doctor on how a parent can talk about food, weight and exercise without passing on shame, and how to notice when a body worry is turning into something more.