Now that you see plus-size women on the covers of fitness magazines and your social feeds are full of hashtags like #curvy (and #proud!), it might seem like the ideal time to raise a body-confident kid.
But a new body image study recently published in The British Journal of Psychiatry suggests that the size-acceptance movement isn't necessarily trickling down to children: When researchers followed more than 6,000 U.K. 8-year-olds into their early teens, they found that 5 percent of girls and 3 percent of boys were dissatisfied with their bodies by the tragically early age of 8.
The scary part is that their insecurities seem to set off disordered eating habits: By age 14, about 2 in 5 girls in the study started dieting, and 8 percent reported binge eating, while 12 percent of 14-year-old boys had dieted, and 3.5 percent binge ate on occasion.
Some girls in the study blamed their insecurities on media pressures to look a certain way, but researchers, who also surveyed the children's parents, ID-ed some additional triggers. For instance, kids with higher BMIs and those with mothers who had a history of disordered eating were more likely to have body image issues, diet, and binge in their early teens.
More research is needed to figure out how to shelter kids from the media, their parents' eating issues, and body dissatisfaction. In the meantime, the best anecdote for poor body image is high self-esteem. So the next time you cross paths with a 8-year-old, remember that kids are super sensitive. It's all the more reason to deliver an impromptu compliment (like, "Cool shoes!" or, "Pretty hair!"), which can only help build them up.
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Elizabeth Narins is a Brooklyn, NY-based writer and a former senior editor at Cosmopolitan.com, where she wrote about fitness, health, and more. Follow her at @ejnarins.
