As I stood in the Marshall’s fitting room yesterday, trying to decide on a dress for my company’s Fire and Ice Holiday Ball, I was slightly irritated by some children in the fitting room next to mine. I could hear a man in the distance asking “Girls, are you alright?” so I knew they must be fairly young.
Anyway, as I tried on dresses, my mind raced with troublesome thoughts such as “Can I lose 10 pounds in the next 3 weeks?”, “Do body wraps really work?”, and “I wonder if a duct-tape-and-Spanx-combo will help?” the children’s constant chatter stopped being annoying for a moment as I heard one girl ask the other “Do you wike this? I wike it. It makes me wook skinny.”
For a moment I stopped worrying about how I was going to fit into this perfect dress I’d found and it pained me to hear a girl so young (maybe six or seven) thinking about “looking skinny”. While my own thoughts were probably unhealthy for a thirty-something year old woman, it didn’t seem fair that such a young girl would even be aware of “looking skinny”. So as we approach the holidays, and we struggle to balance eating, drinking, and being merry with the constant pressure to “look skinny” while doing it all, I urge women everywhere to think twice about being so tough on ourselves and realize the negative impact we may be having on the next generation of young women.
Stranded In The City 
It’s scary to think that girls so young are feeling the pressure to be “skinny”! I desperately hope that this idea is just something they picked up somewhere, and that they are not really taking it to heart. Hopefully they have a role model that helps them realize their full potential as beautiful people that understand the value of healthy happiness.
Exactly!
It’s up to us, as women, as automatic role models whether we know it or not, to build a healthy outlook on our own lives. Whether or not we have children, despite whatever culture we live in, it’s up to us to make that decision (those private dressing room decisions, for example) to love ourselves. If what we see is not what we like, it’s up to us to work on the mind and/or body to get ourselves right.
Just changing ourselves, becoming that role model that we hope young girls look to for guidance, will make the difference. It’s not about “I hope they have a good role model out there somewhere” but about “I will love myself today so that others (including young girls) may be positively affected by my presence in a lasting way. I am a role model as an inherent product of being a living, breathing human woman”.
I also think it’s important to stress that just being active and eating in moderation (especially around the holidays) will help people (those girls, their mothers, etc) feel better about themselves long-term. No need for extreme diets or workouts and no need for self-loathing. Just a consistent medium of those things which help maintain a Better You.
Young girls starting in with thoughts of looking skinny is sad and unnecessary.