How Beauty Is Made: a discussion on body image

How Beauty Is Made - Dove Campaign - www.campaignforrealbeauty.com

Issues with body image seem to be starting at a progressively younger age. Even children as young as 6 are not exempt from these kinds of perception problems. Advertising, along with the incidence of young girls reading fashion magazines, is projected to be a major contributor to the body image issues of pre-adolescents. Even pre-adolescents (including those younger than 12) report that they diet to control their weight (Women's Health Network). Sure, the media does plenty to perpetuate this problem, but certain companies are speaking up and out against the uber-thin and surgically enhanced image of the so-called "typical female."

Leo Burnett in Chicago has created a great campaign touting real beauty. This specific television ad is a great example of how distorted our perception of perfection is. The more your children realize that even the models they are dying to look like are digitally altered, the more they will be accepting of their own . Kudos to Dove for taking a stand and doing some damage control.

You can check out the whole Dove campaign HERE

Other resources that will aid in talking to your child about true body image:

About Face
Adios Barbie
Body Image For Kids

the T.V. and American children

• The average child watches 1,680 minutes of television per week (28 hours)

• 50% of children between the ages of 6 to 17 have a tv in their room
• 70% of daycare centers use television during a typical day
• American youth spend an average of 700 hours a year in school
• American youth average watching 1,500 hours of television a year.
• Children are exposed to 30,000 commercials a year.
  

In a study conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health, it was found that children have a difficult time deciding what is fiction, and what is reality. They embellish stories with their own ideas, added people and objects not in the movie they had watched, and had a hard time telling when a story ended. Nearly half of the children in the study thought a person on television had spoken directly to them and 20% had actually answered back. It's not until age 10 that children are generally able to identify cartoons as fantasy and can distinguish between funny and serious violence. Children cannot identify the motives behind acts of violence.

Silverblatt, Art. Media Literacy: Keys to Interpreting Media Messages. 2nd Edition. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

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