Girls With Low Self Esteem? How to Help Your Daughter With Body Changes
Photo courtesy of Third Strand Photography.
When I found out my first baby was a girl, I broke down in tears - but not for reasons you might think.
I was scared to have a daughter. I was terrified that my own history of a horrific relationship with food and my body would come back to haunt me. I struggled so much as a young girl and teenager, and I feared that somehow the cycle would repeat itself with my own daughter.
Fast forward to today and 4 girls later, my daughters have taught me so much about courage and resilience against a diet culture that is particularly demeaning toward women.
A lovely mother I know recently asked me this question: “My 8-year old daughter is already self-conscious of her body. Body image is something I struggle with. How can I help her?”
As a mom of 4 girls myself, I deeply resonate with this question and the desire to raise up daughters who confidently embrace their own bodies.
This question is something that has been asked of me in many different ways, and I know it’s a concern that many mothers carry with them.
Is it possible to raise a daughter who is confident in her body in face of the many challenges our society presents today?
On top of this, is it possible to encourage your daughter to love and appreciate her one and only body, even if you might not fully be able to embrace this for yourself?
Yes. Yes. YES.
As a mom who has recovered from an eating disorder myself, I can tell you with confidence that there is hope for you and your children.
No matter what your past has been or your current relationship with your own body, you can be a powerful part of your daughter’s ability to cultivate a positive relationship with food and her body.
It’s never too late to right the cycle, to commit to your own ongoing healing with your body image while supporting your daughter with hers.
In fact, you may be the most influential person in her life in regards to how she feels about herself and her body.
Whatever the world is telling her, your loving presence and example can be the light that guides her home to herself, illuminating a path toward freedom from the overwhelming outside noise of diet culture.
Body Image Challenges for Young Girls
There’s no denying that our children and daughters in particular, are facing an unprecedented amount of pressure to conform to an unrealistic standard when it comes to their appearance.
We’re moving into a new parenting era with my oldest daughters as they grow into their preadolescent ages.
This can be a hard age for many reasons, including pre-puberty body changes that are beginning to occur. For many girls at this age, the body changes experienced, couple with external peer pressures can be a trigger for disordered eating, poor body image, and low self-esteem.
I distinctly remember being more conscious of my body at this age. At the age of 8 was the first time I remember weighing myself and becoming fixated on making that number smaller. I distinctly remember being more aware of how my body compared to other girls my age and feeling uncomfortable with my size and shape.
In many ways, the unaddressed body concerns I faced as a pre-adolescent were weeds that took root and grew deeper as I transitioned into my teen years. The body insecurities I felt as an 8 year old girl snowballed through my teens, eventually escalating into a full force eating disorder at the age of 17.
When I look at my girls and see them going through these formative years now, my strongest hope and desire is that they would feel safe in their bodies. I want them to know beyond a doubt that they can trust their bodies and that they deserve to treat their bodies with utter care and respect throughout their lives.
I don’t want them to fear the changes that are happening in their bodies or to resort to a damaging relationship with food as a way to somehow manipulate their bodies.
I want them to understand that their bodies are the vessels for their souls, the one and only place that they’ll call home while Earthside; because of this, their bodies require kindness and compassion.
I want them to understand that their bodies are meant to change throughout their lives and will continue to do so. I want them to be confident enough in themselves to embrace the changes in their bodies - no matter what season of their lives they might find themselves in.
I know that there are countless mothers who join me in this - who only want to see their daughter flourishing, especially during times of intense body changes and transitions.
If you have struggled with poor body image or have felt like you’ve been at war with your own body for as long as you remember - there is STILL hope, for you and your daughter.
The good news is that you don’t have to have it all figured out in order to support your daughter in building positive self-esteem and confidence in herself.
We can raise up a generation of daughters who believe their inherent self-worth beyond a shadow of a doubt, who don’t feel like they have to shrink or stay small in order to meet anyone’s approval.
As a side note, I want to be sure to acknowledge that this conversation is absolutely relevant for boys, too.
As a mother of a son, I want him to grow up confident in his body. Boys and men are also faced with unprecedented body image challenges in this social media age, and I’ll address this topic more specifically in a later blog post.
For the sake of this conversation, I’ll be focusing specifically on girls and how we can help support their self-esteem as they go through the transitions of puberty and body changes.
However, the majority of these concepts can absolutely be applied to any child in your life.
Supporting Your Daughter Through Times of Transition
First, let’s talk about why the pre-adolescent to adolescent years might be especially challenging for your daughter, as well as why these years are an important time to support and build her self-esteem and body confidence.
For starters, everything about your young adolescent is changing: physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially.
The rapid physical changes alone that your daughter may go through can be enough to put her an unease with herself, or make her feel uncertain about her body.
Generally, the onset of puberty is around 9 to 14 years old; possibly as early as age 8 for some girls.
The increase in hormonal levels will sequence the beginning of breast development, followed by pubic hair growth, widening of the hips, growth spurt, menstruation, and the completion of breast and pubic hair growth. Phew! That is a LOT of change for your daughter to go through in a short amount of time.
As she goes through puberty, your daughter will experience fluctuations with appetite and continual body changes as she gets closer to her adult size, shape and proportion. These rapid body changes can make it difficult for her to feel satisfied with her physical appearance, especially when faced with unrealistic cultural ideals.
Your adolescent daughter is also figuring out her autonomy and learning to establish herself as a separate person.
She’s more likely to become more self-conscious, with positive and negative feelings about herself that may come and go. She may be more influenced by peer pressure and concerned more about what her friends and others think of her, while having increased worries about her appearance.
How to Raise a Girl’s Self-Esteem Through Body Changes
So with all this in mind, how can you help build your daughter’s self-esteem through the body changes she will go through?
Here are 10 suggestions to help you as you guide your own daughter through some of the physical and emotional changes she is going through to support growing confidence in her one and only body:
Open the conversation for body changes:
For starters, I think it’s important to intentionally create space and time for open conversation around body changes. I know this can be uncomfortable for a lot of parents for many reasons, especially if you’ve struggled with your own body image issues.
However, when we can make space for our children to have honest conversations around the body changes they are going through, this can help them know they have a safe place to be heard and explore what they’re feeling and going through.
Remember that shame grows in silence. If your child is already facing any uneasy feelings about her body, this will only be magnified without awareness and recognition.
Even if your daughter hasn’t initiated conversation with you about her body and how it’s changing doesn’t mean that she’s not thinking about it or already hearing/having these conversations with her peers.
Remember that you were her first safe place and will continue to be, especially when you can create a neutral zone for her to download what she’s experiencing.
If you don’t know what to say or ask her, that’s okay! You don’t have to have all the answers or have everything figured out for her to know that she’s safe to talk with you and explore these conversations together. As the parent, try to take the lead by initiating the conversation.
Your daughter is likely already mulling over thoughts in her head about her own body that she might not know what to do with.
Give her a safe place to let her process those thoughts. If you’re not sure how to initiate conversations with her about her body, you can try something like: “Hey honey, let’s sit down this week and chat about some of the new things that are happening in your life right now”, or, “When would be a good time for us to chat? I’d love to support you and hear about how you’re feeling lately!”
Of course, you can modify this, depending on the age of your daughter.
I’ve found that the conversation feels less threatening if your daughter knows she has an open outlet to talk about how she’s feeling or what’s on her mind, rather than be lectured about something.
And on that note, when you’re talking with your daughter about her body, try to ask questions and then listen, rather than charging into the conversation with your own agenda.
Your daughter is likely already feeling vulnerable about many things related to her body; to help create a safe place for her to have these conversations with you, she needs to know that her voice matters and will be heard, too.
If you need some guidance in this area consider using a book that promotes body changes in a positive light that you can read with your daughter to help encourage an open conversation.
Remember that open and honest conversations and communication are nurtured through a respectful relationship with one another.
2. Normalize body changes and the feelings that come with them:
When I was a young girl, I don’t think I really understood why my body was supposed to change.
Suddenly, my body was changing, and it felt completely foreign to me.
Unknown body changes can be scary, leaving your daughter to feel like they are something to fight against, rather than embrace and accept.
This is where it might be helpful to have conversations with your daughter - not just around the fact that her body is changing but WHY these body changes are GOOD and necessary!
So far, my daughter’s have responded positively to discussions around why their bodies need to change as they grow older and why these changes are a necessary part of their transformation from a young girl into a woman.
A large part of diet culture is promoting the lie that our bodies are not meant to change and that we should do everything possible to keep them small, to keep them the same.
It’s so apparent when you look at advertisements aimed toward women, trying to promote the idea that you should look like you did in high school.
What?
This is a LIE that needs to be dismantled and challenged; as parents, we need to tackle this lie early on with our own daughters to help immunize them against the destructiveness of diet culture.
Promote the benefits of body changes and help your daughters understand why this is a necessary and important part of development and growth.
When body changes are normalized, this can help negate the fear and foreignness that tends to surface during this time.
It can also be helpful to name the feelings that your daughter might be experiencing as her body changes to normalize these as well.
For example, you can acknowledge her discomfort, uneasiness, etc. while also helping her understand that these feelings don’t indicate that there is something wrong with her body.
Remind her that these feelings are not permanent and aren’t a reflection of who she is.
3. Encourage body diversity, honor all bodies:
I remember when one of my daughters came home from kindergarten and was talking about her day. She told me how one of her friend’s mommy was a helper in the class.
She shared, “She was very nice and a very big lady. She helped me glue my papers together.”
It took me back for a second, as I realized how she described characteristics of this woman that she innocently observed.
She didn’t have any negative connotations with larger bodies; she was simply describing what she saw.
What struck me was how she described how she was nice and the way she helped her - a reminder that who we are as individuals has nothing to do with our body size.
Diet culture promotes an unrealistic thin ideal that is impossible for the majority of women to achieve. This starts at a young age: think about the standard Barbie doll shape that girls play with or the thinner shapes of all the famous princesses that they come to idolize.
With such lack of body diversity, young girls start to believe that they are the outsiders for not having an “acceptably thin” body type and may begin to feel self-conscious of this at a young age.
The reality is that there are so many different types of bodies, and ultimately, there is NO bad way to have a body. However, when there is limited exposure to different body types, this can narrow our views of what bodies look like.
I think it’s important to have this discussion with our daughters to help them understand that bodies aren’t made to look in only one way.
We can help them understand that bodies are unique and meant to look different.
Some individuals have smaller bodies, others may live in larger bodies - but regardless, there is no moral attachment to body size.
This takes challenging your own internal weight bias and fat phobia that may be inherently present. This is CRUCIAL to helping your child do the same and to grow up being accepting of diverse body types.
4. Keep the scales and diets away:
As I shared earlier, I distinctly remember standing on a scale for the first time. I was about 8 years old at the time.
I don’t even remember what the number was. I just remember that I needed to try to make the number smaller, to shrink myself into a smaller body.
When I think about my own 8 year old daughter, this makes me incredibly heartbroken.
Our daughters are more likely to feel the need to manipulate or change their bodies if they see dieting, restricting, and disordered eating habits around them.
Research has found that maternal dieting also has an effect on their young daughters’ developing ideas about dieting, from ages as young as 5.
Dieting in adolescents is the most important predictor of an eating disorder, which can create a severe struggle around food and body image.
This is not shared with the intention of creating guilt or shame around anyone who might diet.
If you have children, it’s important to understand the ramifications and potential consequences of dieting behaviors.
Children pick up on EVERYTHING, even when you think they may not be watching or paying attention.
In the absence of dieting behaviors, your daughter has a better chance to develop a positive relationship with food and her body.
You can be the influential presence that encourages this strong foundation for your daughter by giving up dieting and throwing away the scale.
That scale has nothing to say about your self-worth or value; it doesn’t have any belonging in your home or in your life.
Toss it out, and you’re creating freedom for yourself and your daughter by teaching her that she doesn’t need a scale to measure her self-worth.
If you’ve been struggling with chronic dieting or disordered eating but want to heal your relationship with food to help your daughter, please check out this post: “How to Raise an Intuitive Eater When You’re Learning to Become One.”
5. Highlight function over appearance:
From young ages, little girls are used to hearing, “how pretty you look”, or, “you look so cute in that dress!”, etc.
While these comments are usually innocent and well-intended, it reinforces the idea that a girl is merely her appearance, placing value on her looks over her abilities, character qualities, etc.
This cycle is perpetuated through her life, especially with mainstream media.
As a parent, you can help right the cycle here by highlighting your daughter’s abilities over her appearance.
In doing so, you are helping her see that her body is an instrument, not an ornament for the world to comment on and scrutinize.
So while it may be encouraging for your daughter to hear that she is beautiful, she needs to hear and know that she is more than beautiful - that she is more than just her appearance.
Give positive reinforcement and encouraging comments about things that have nothing to do with appearance.
What is your daughter good at? What character qualities do you admire or observe? Encourage your daughter to do the same for other people.
Help her see past appearance, and she will recognize that her looks are the least important thing about her.
6. Support body autonomy with respectful feeding:
Did you know that your feeding relationship with your child can be an important foundation for how your child feels about her body?
Body confidence will naturally grow from a positive and trusting feeding relationship.
When you’re respectful of your job with feeding and allow your child to do her part with eating, she will naturally learn to trust her body.
When your daughter has positive eating experiences, is allowed to explore food on her terms, and is given structure and support around food, this can all help her flourish in a healthy relationship with food.
When she’s allowed the space to trust her eating instincts at the family dinner table, she will learn to grow confidently in herself.
Skills that your daughter develops around food can also help naturally build her self-esteem. This can include skills with eating, serving herself food, helping preparing food and more.
7. How You Speak About Your Own Body:
We talked about ways you can talk with your daughter to highlight her abilities over appearance. But what about the way you talk about your own body?
Remember that little ears are listening, and your daughter is internalizing the messages she hears you speaking about your own body.
How do you describe yourself in front of her? How do you talk about your body? Are you critical or negative about yourself?
This can be a difficult area - especially if you are healing from your own body image issues and are working on being kinder to your body.
Give yourself grace and compassion through this process. You are deserving of kindness and acceptance toward yourself. Speaking kindly toward your body is a gift, not only for yourself, but for your daughter as well.
With that said, when is the last time you intentionally said something POSITIVE about your body in front of your kids? 🤔
Sometimes, I think it’s easy to lose sight of the simple things we CAN do to empower our children. If we want to raise a generation of women who are resilient to the destructive lies that will tell them they will never be enough, or that they have to change their bodies to be accepted, it has to start with US.
If we want to immunize our daughters from diet culture, we have to set ourselves free FIRST so that we can live the change we want for our children. I recognize that this is so much easier said than done. It takes courage to create change and face the fears that are often wrapped up in our own insecurities.
If you’re struggling in this area or simply want to be a more positive example with your kiddos, you can start here and now, no matter what your past has been.
Remember that YOU 👏 ARE 👏 ENOUGH.
Celebrate the functionality of what your body is capable of, and let your children be part of that celebration. If it feels awkward or foreign to speak positively about your body in front of your kids - don’t give up, and don’t stop trying.
With each step of faith, you are teaching yourself a different story. In the process, you are showing your children that all bodies are worthy of celebration - yours AND theirs, too.
What is 1 kind thing you can say about yourself in front of your kids today?
8. Teach her how to be a media critic:
In an age of social media and filters, it’s become harder to differentiate fantasy from reality.
By helping your daughter become a critical consumer of media, she will be less likely to be manipulated by it.
When looking through magazine ads, TV commercials, movies, etc. use these as opportunities to educate your daughter about the intentional marketing ploys behind these messages.
Help her understand how the media will perpetuate the mainstream message that her body is not good enough in order to buy into a multi-billion dollar dieting industry.
When your daughter is educated in this area, she will be empowered to rise above this.
9. Advocate for your daughter and for change:
Sadly, harmful messages pertaining to health and your daughter’s body are hiding in unexpected places.
For example, your child might be exposed to a “nutrition lesson” at school that contains fear-mongering messages about food and weight or a misinformed health practitioner who is offer ill-advice about BMI assessments.
It’s not uncommon for these messages to creep around schools and healthcare offices.
It’s everywhere. Just remember - you can opt your daughter out of anything that you might feel is counterproductive to building self-esteem and body confidence.
Continue to have conversations with your daughter about how health can’t simply be measured by weight, size, or a BMI measurement.
Stay informed about school policies and health-related activities that your child may be encouraged to participate in.
You can opt her out of it, and while you can’t protect her from everything, you can advocate for change and for different approaches to health and nutrition, especially in the school systems.
10. Offer unconditional acceptance, regardless of appearance and body size:
Lastly, it’s vital for your daughter to feel her value and worth, regardless of how her body and appearance might change.
This is a fundamental cornerstone for children: to know that they are unconditionally loved and accepted, no matter what they may look like on the outside.
It’s all too easy for kids to connect their worthiness to their appearance or what they’re able to accomplish, but this just reinforces the lie that they are merely what they do instead of who they are.
Remind your daughter that she is loved and will always be loved through any and all changes that she goes through.
Let her know that you are proud of her and the person she is becoming, and that nothing can ever lessen that or take that away.
Continue to Work on Your Own Healing Around Food and Body Image
Is it still possible to guide your daughter with self-acceptance, self-esteem, and positive body image, even if you don’t feel strong in these areas yourself?
100% - YES.
If you are struggling with poor body image or low self-esteem, this doesn’t make you a bad mother. Nor does it mean you’ve failed your daughter.
One of the most profound gifts you can give your daughter to support her self-esteem and body confidence as she grows up is your own continued healing work in these areas as well.
If you know that there’s room for you to grow in these areas but aren’t sure where to start, consider these reflection questions:
How did you feel about your changing body as a pre-adolescent/adolescent?
What might make you uncomfortable about addressing body changes with your own daughter?
What kind of support did you need as a young girl that you maybe didn’t receive?
How can you offer the kind of support you needed to your own growing daughter?
No matter where you might be on your own journey, it’s never too late to choose a different course of action - for yourself and your daughter. Check out this post here for more support: “How to Raise Kids Who Love Their Bodies Even if You Don’t Love Yours.”
Negative body image and poor self-esteem are often perpetuated through generations. You can be the person to stop the ongoing cycle in its tracks in order to create a generation that is free from diet culture.
If you need any extra support in this area, please connect with me today - I would love to hear more about your story and how I might be able to guide you toward a more peaceful relationship with food and your body.
What areas have you found it challenging to support your daughter with her self-esteem and body changes?