Fostering Healthy Body Acceptance In Your Teen Daughter
Teaching a young girl how to accept and love her body starts with her mother. You will be a mirror to either her strengths or her insecurities. It’s up to you to decide which she will reflect on. She will already be bombarded with the unattainable world of filters, advertising, TikTok videos, and the latest internet celebrity. She will hear the gossip of peers calling out the too fat, too thin, too tan, not tan enough, too tall, too short, anything too much, making her feel less than. But you momma, can lessen the damage of these things.
Never Criticize Yourself in Her Presence
Momma I’m with you. I’ve got pounds to lose. There are wrinkles in places there used to be none. Gravity is not my best friend anymore. But my daughter will never ever know these things from me. I will never say these things out loud. If I criticize myself, I am teaching my daughter that her worth resides in physical perfection and that is her only worth. She will learn to talk about herself the same way and that is not something I ever want her to manifest. You have to be the positive example for how your daughter learns to talk to herself.
Focus On the Strengths and Not the Flaws
If you want to encourage your daughter to exercise more, eat healthier and just be in better physical peak shape then talk to her of her strength. Teach her how weights will make her body strong. How exercise will give her a healthy heart to accomplish things. How getting enough water and sunshine will make her skin glow. And how eating living foods will give her vitamins to heal her body so she can do all the things. Encourage healthy habits instead of talking negatively of her less than desirable habits.
The Body Is Nothing but a Vessel
Teach your daughter that her body is just a vessel for her beautiful soul. Teach her that vessels come in all shapes, colors and sizes and that’s okay, because just like the variety of birds in the universe, we are all given a different kind of beauty, but it’s still beauty because God doesn’t make mistakes.
Be Her Inspirational Guide
Take the time to prepare healthy meals alongside your daughter. Take her on walks with you, hiking in the local parks, and bike riding around the neighborhood. Rejoice in the beauty of women you encounter and compliment them often. When you join in with these activities, it not only makes your child better, but you are making a better you along the way. And bonus, it helps others feel better too and you can’t go wrong with that.
Stand Up for Others
Teach your daughters that it is never ok to make fun of another’s physical attributes. Teach her to stand up for those who are bullied, and to find the beauty in others because everyone has something beautiful about them. Teach them about kindness first and foremost. Being kind makes anyone beautiful.
Give Her Compliments
Give her compliments on her accomplishments, her grades, her performance in the school play, or the goal she scored in soccer. You can tell her she is beautiful, but her beauty is in way more than her looks. Let her know this often. Let her know that physical beauty is just a bonus and not a goal, because beauty fluctuates depending on the viewer.
All the things I have learned to help foster a healthy self-esteem in my daughter has been forged in the fires of the things that were not done right in my youth. The diet culture, the piles of fashion magazines I devoured wanting to be 6’0 tall and 110 pounds like my favorite supermodel, and from those before me who hated their bodies and vocalized it to me. Society doesn’t always give us the best role models, so it is up to us to find new and better role models to point our daughters in the direction to. No one should ever determine their worth by their beauty as beauty is transcendent with time and circumstance. We as women know better now and it’s time to do better for the next generation. When we as mothers learn to love and accept ourselves, flaws and all, we are doing the biggest favor we can for our daughters so they will learn to do the same.
