Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Advice On Avoiding Parenting Body-Image Pitfalls

I cannot sing the praises loudly enough for Stephanie Goldfarb’s Kveller piece, “Stop Telling Your Daughter She Should Eat Less Cream Cheese.” Love the piece, love the headline, love the message. In it, Goldfarb — ”a chef, a social worker, and a Jewish youth professional” — recounts leading a body image workshop mainly for Jewish women, and hearing from one woman, Linda, seeking advice on how to reduce her teenage daughter’s cream cheese consumption. Goldfarb recalls asking the woman whether she had reason to be worried about her daughter’s well-being. She did not. It was simply that mom “was concerned that her daughter might be getting a bit chubby.”

Goldfarb goes on to make a powerful case against body-shaming one’s offspring, or micromanaging a teenage child’s food consumption:

I can’t think of a single young woman who needs her parents to tell her to stop eating so much cream cheese.

They get enough of that from their friends, from the men in their lives, from the women in their lives, from social media, and from the naturally chaotic process of growing into themselves. Young women, whatever their background, do not need one more authority figure to point out to them when they no longer look like a sexless child and should cover-up/eat less/work out more.

Precisely. In a society that so values thinness, in women and girls especially, well-meaning parents may think they’re offering helpful advice when they make remarks along those lines to their daughters. But ours is also a society that demands girls and women think about their weight more or less constantly. And it’s that demand parents ought to push back against, rather than encourage.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of The Perils of “Privilege”, from St. Martin’s Press.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.