Body Image

A mother is in a shop changing room with her nine-year-old son, who is trying on a pair of jeans. Over the last six months the boy has started to look at himself differently. Half-watching, the mother says without thinking, “They look nice, they make your legs look longer.” Her son looks at her in the mirror for a moment too long, then turns and asks, in a flat voice, whether his legs are short.

The mother says no. She also realises, with a sinking feeling, that she has just said what her own mother used to say in changing rooms in 1991, and that without meaning to, she has passed something on.

Some version of this comes up often in our work at the practice. Almost always, a parent realises they have been having a conversation about their child’s body only after they have had it: the remark in the changing room, the comment about clothes that don’t suit the child, the diet talk at the dinner table that the child has overheard for years and, at nine, is starting to use about themselves.