Life

Advice On Avoiding Parenting Body-Image Pitfalls

India Menuez’s Chanel bagel purse. Image by Getty Images

By Phoebe Maltz Bovy March 24, 2017

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 bovy@forward.com. She is the author of The Perils of “Privilege”, from St. Martin’s Press.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a former editor of the Sisterhood blog at the Forward. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The New Republic and The Atlantic. Her book, “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’” was published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017. She has a PhD in French and French Studies from New York University, and has read a lot of 19th century French Jewish newspapers for a 21st century American.

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