School Age

Sarah Dufton of Guelph, Ont., noticed something odd about the way her five-year-old son, Kyle, was eating his bacon. “He was picking off the fat parts and just eating the little strips of meat that were left,” she recalls. When she asked him about it, Kyle explained that he didn’t want to get fat.

“There’s no way anyone could think he was fat,” says Dufton. “Really, he’s skinny. But he’s very worried about getting fat.”

Body image an issue starting at younger ages

At five? Isn’t that a bit young to be worried about how you look? Not anymore, says Shelly Russell-Mayhew, a psychology professor at the University of Calgary and co-founder of Body Image Works, an organization that holds educational workshops on this issue. “It used to be that body image wasn’t often an issue until adolescence, but today it’s starting at younger and younger ages. By age seven, some children are already feeling dissatisfied with their bodies. By age nine, one in five girls is dieting to lose weight.”

Why so young? “We are living in an appearance-obsessed culture,” Russell-Mayhew explains. No child who watches TV can miss the message that being thin and looking good is what life is all about. Parents, too, may be passing on their own obsessions. “If mom is always asking, ‘Do I look fat in this?’, pretty soon her child is going to be looking at his own bum in the mirror,” Russell-Mayhew says.

And even if your child manages to evade the media, he’ll get the message from other kids. Russell-Mayhew describes a research study where children were given cards with photos of other children and asked to select the ones they’d want to play with. Consistently, even with kids as young as four years old, the fat kids were chosen last.

Originally published in Today's Parent, April 2009