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.