Thursday, July 06, 2006

Eye of the Beholder

How do today's mothers teach their daughters to have healthy, realistic body images?

How do I teach them that health = beauty when I am overweight and essentially unhealthy?

How do I instill in my girls enough self-esteem so they never feel the need to cut open their chests to put foreign bodies under their breasts? Without being judgemental of those who do?

How do you teach girls "beauty comes from within"?

How will my lessons fare against the lessons of Teen Vogue and Barbie?

How do I respond to Mimi when I tell her she can't eat five brownies because it's not healthy and she asks "why, because it will make me fat?"

How do you teach girls to find beauty in every person, but not to emulate emaciation?

How will they define physical beauty in themselves? In others?

I wonder if I showed them these three pictures and asked which of them they think is the most beautiful, which they would pick?

1 comment:

Jenny said...

We will lead by example.

We will be beautiful regaurdless of zits, split ends, spare tires, sunken boobies and grey hair. We will age with grace and show them beauty from within as well as showing them the beauty in all shapes. We will not obsess and pick and wilt, we will not dye and carve and tighten, we will age for real and our husbands will still find beauty in us and that is were our daughters will find thier future body image (from their own father's attitudes).