Alya told me this: “When I was younger, I felt as beautiful as a Disney princess.” I somehow doubt she still feels this way. Alya lives in a world that convinces little girls there is one physically superior look, a world where fifteen-year-olds such as Emma-Jane routinely say things like “I hate all the fat on my body. I don’t know why, but I do.” Born in love, learning to hate. So, what happens as girls grow?
As her parent, you may notice your teen girl’s emerging focus on the minutiae of her appearance, the drastic increase in her mirror time, the obsessing over hair, makeup, clothing style, and physique—more care, more conscientiousness, and more self-criticism. There are both biological and sociological reasons for this shift of focus to her appearance. According to Louann Brizendine, author of The Female Brain, when girls enter puberty, chemical changes to the brain facilitate this obsession with their looks. “The teen girl’s brain is sprouting, reorganizing and pruning neuronal circuits that drive the way she thinks, feels, and acts—and obsesses over her looks,” Brizendine says. “Her brain is unfolding ancient instructions on how to be a woman.”1 This speaks to the biological reasons why your teen girl may be obsessed with her appearance, but what else is going on? It’s possible that she may be mistaking looking good for feeling good.
Ginny Jones, editor of More-Love.org—an online resource for parents of children with eating disorders—asserts that a teen girl’s obsession with and criticism of her looks should not be looked on as normal or acceptable. She says:
We live in a culture that has normalized body hatred, and poor body image. This includes feelings of despair and anguish over the appearance of one’s body. When we hate our bodies, we believe they are flawed. Believing that the body is flawed, especially when one is physically healthy and able-bodied, makes us vulnerable to body hate, disordered eating, and eating disorders. What is actually “normal” from a health standpoint is body acceptance. True health occurs not based on a number on the scale. Health is only possible when we believe our body is fundamentally good. We take better care of our bodies when we accept them.2
I love that girls want to look their best, and careful grooming is a form of self-care. Still, I worry that girls put too much emphasis on their looks and embrace too much maintenance (lash lifts, gel nails, lip fillers, and hair extensions, to name a few) as they strive for the “perfect look” at the cost of true self-worth and self-acceptance. When girls feel too fat, too ugly, too awkward, too disgusting, they want to sink inside themselves, turn on themselves, or protect themselves by rebelling against any beauty standard at all. In short, they want to alter themselves and conform. One girl told me she wants to change “all my fat into muscle so I wouldn’t hate looking in the mirror so much.”
Sadly, as girls grow up, and especially as they approach puberty, they learn to hate their appearance. Most body self-criticism takes root between birth and puberty. Although she was born loving herself as is, cultural, societal, and even familial pressures promote negative messaging such as “Be tall, skinny, and this kind of beautiful, with flawless skin and a bright smile.” In other words, “Your body is not good enough as is.” She didn’t choose to internalize this way of thinking or to not love her body, but these messages are prevalent. In fact, we have become so accustomed to believing these directives that we also think self-criticism is necessary and important for self-development. In Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski discusses how women are reluctant to believe they are beautiful and to let go of self-criticism in order to nourish self-confidence and adopt healthy lifestyle habits. She says that body criticism is so entrenched in Western culture that most women hardly notice how ubiquitous and toxic it is. It’s so ingrained, in fact, that “when women start to think concretely about it, they begin to discover a sense that they need their self-criticism in order to stay motivated. We believe it does us good to torture ourselves, at least a little bit.”3 That’s right: self-criticism is seen as both necessary and beneficial.
When I look at girls, I see beauty in many different forms—unique ethnicities, abilities, personalities, and shapes and sizes. I’m sure you see divergent aesthetics in your daughter too. Girls are beautiful, but they are reluctant to believe us when we tell them. There are so many obstacles in her way when it comes to feeling beautiful: her own self-doubt, for example, and unfortunate cultural and societal messages that bombard her with images typically showing one body type and size and a single, narrow definition of physical attractiveness. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not voluptuous and curvy.
Girls learn that the body they have should be scrutinized, must be flawed, and most certainly needs to be altered. They also look outside of themselves for cultural standards around appearance. Kayla, now seventeen years old, told me she didn’t think much about her body until she was older. “I believe it was in Grade 9 when I started comparing my body to my peers and thinking I should be critical, you know, because they were doing it.”
At the same time as your teen is comparing her body to her peers, she’s also sizing herself up against the digitally altered images she sees on her social media feed. She’ll conclude that her body is not only different but wrong. She’ll struggle to find anything that she appreciates about it, and she’ll learn to talk like every other girl around her: “I am so fat!” “I ate way too much last night, so I’m not eating anything today.” Or she’ll ask others, “What do you eat every day? I’d do anything to be thin, like you!” Another girl I spoke with said, “I consciously and subconsciously compare myself to others via pictures and videos of people I see online. This can be for the worse because I will think to myself, They are so fit and healthy. How can I be like them? What do I need to change about myself to become like that?
So what about the girl who does feel beautiful? Who accepts her body? Strangely, she is often viewed as “abnormal,” or even considered a social anomaly. I asked girls what would happen if another girl approached them and declared, “I feel amazing about my body today and love my healthy, glowing skin!” They laughed, thinking I was joking. “This would never happen,” one of them told me. “Never.” Find me a girl who is body confident and you will also find a girl labelled as conceited and “into herself.”
Our competitive and comparative culture puts insane pressure on our girls. Exposure to social media; the obsession with selfies; the power and allure of crafted images that show idealized appearance standards; and myriad products that make empty promises of shinier hair, whiter teeth, and reduced cellulite—taken together, these influences are all too often overwhelming. And they leave teen girls emulating what they see and not what they feel, all the while believing that the perfect body and look can be attained through hard work, sacrifice, and sheer force of will. Girls as young as seven years old complain about frizzy hair, fat legs, and flat chests. I see girls who hide in their hoodies, slouching and turning their bodies inward in an attempt to diminish their developing breasts, and awkwardly carrying around their gangly bodies. One of my clients, Alexis, was mortified by the fact she got so tall, so quickly. Not only did she have to contend with being taller than every boy in her class, but she also had to put up with the constant annoying commentary—“You are so big!” “No kidding,” she’d tell me. What all these girls share is a deep dissatisfaction with their bodies and confusion as to why they don’t feel good. “My body is not enough,” they conclude, “so I’ll change it.” What they long for is unconditional love for themselves. What they experience, whether it is self-imposed or coming from outside influences, is rejection.
Rejection is borne of the self-critical language that so many girls are convinced is the motivator for change (an idea society as a whole has bought into). “If I am harsh on myself,” goes the rationale, “telling myself I am fat, ugly, lazy, and not beautiful enough, I will be driven to change and I will never become complacent or conceited.” It’s the perfect plan to guarantee transformation. Except, in the process, there is no self-love, self-kindness, or self-compassion. A teen girl who pushes herself to lose ten pounds so she feels better about herself may lose the weight, but she may feel awful still, and then confused as to why losing the weight
