Speaking of Psychology: How moms can help their daughters build a healthy body image, with Janet Boseovski, PhD, and Ashleigh Gallagher, PhD

Girls begin receiving messages that will shape their body image as young as preschool. Janet Boseovski, PhD, and Ashleigh Gallagher, PhD, author of Beyond Body Positivity: A Mother's Science-Based Guide for Helping Girls Build a Healthy Body Image, talk about how kids understand body image from early childhood through the tween years and why parents’ early influence is so important.

Janet Boseovski, PhD, is a professor of psychology and department head at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She studies social and cognitive development in 3- to 10-year-old children. Her main areas of research include children’s perceptions of power, status, and wealth; personality trait judgments about others (niceness, meanness, trustworthiness); informal learning in science center settings; and body image development.

Ashleigh Gallagher, PhD, is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She is a social psychologist whose research interests include emotion, culture, group dynamics, and gender. She also has a long-standing interest in bridging the academic-real world gap and has worked both inside and outside academia as a lecturer, public policy researcher, and research consultant.

Kim Mills: How often do you hear comments like this: “I’m going to be good and skip dessert tonight,” or “That actress looks amazing—for her age,” or “That dress really flatterers you”? Maybe you’ve even said a few of these things. Sentences like these might seem harmless or even positive, but they send messages to girls from a very young age about how to think about their own bodies and those of others.

Today we’re going to talk to two psychologists about body image, child development, and how psychological science can help mothers guide their daughters toward a healthy relationship with their bodies. So what is body image and why is it important? How do kids understand body image from early childhood through the tween years? How does a parent’s own body image affect their kids? And how much sway do parents really have in this sphere, especially with social media, peers and other influences all competing for kids’ attention?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

I have two guests today. First is Dr. Janet Boseovski, a developmental psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Her research has looked at children’s understanding of the social world and the development of body image in children. She’s published dozens of academic papers and is a member of the board of directors of the Jean Piaget Society and an editorial board member for the journals Social Development and The Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

Next is Dr. Ashley Gallagher, who is a social psychologist and senior lecturer in psychology at UNC Greensboro. Her research interests include emotion, culture, group dynamics, and gender. She has a longstanding interest in bridging the academic real world gap and has worked in public policy research and as a research consultant. Doctors Gallagher and Boseovski are coauthors of a new book, Beyond Body Positive: A Mother’s Science-based Guide for Helping Girls Build a Healthy Body Image, published in December by APA Books. 

Thank you both for joining me.

Janet Boseovski, PhD: Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Ashleigh Gallagher, PhD: Thank you.

Mills: Okay, so the title of the book is Beyond Body Positive. Why did you choose that title? What does it mean to go beyond body positive when thinking about a healthy body image?

Gallagher: Well, first we should say that there is the science on positive body image and then there is the social movement of body positivity. And so we were pretty careful choosing this title, but we wanted to indicate that some of the memes that we see in popular culture and some of the treatment of this topic in popular culture is perhaps oversimplified and that this is actually a really complex and deep topic. So we wanted to bring science to everyday moms and tell them what it offers a little bit differently than just the cultural movement of body positivity.

Boseovski: And so the idea is that it’s great if we can celebrate our bodies, but the way that we feel about our bodies is so much more complicated—as your introduction, the great examples that you had illustrated, right? So maybe it sounds like a great idea to just tell people to love their bodies, but most people have complicated relationships with their bodies. And we also think that a lot of the popular culture is so excessively focused on the body. And so when we talk about protecting ourselves as women, hearing all of the cultural messages that we hear, we really want to arm girls. It’s almost like we’re saying let’s get ahead of the culture and go beyond body positivity because you are not just your body, you are so much more. And how do we fit all of these other characteristics about you into this picture? Because this one has been so overblown for girls and women.

Mills: Your book is directed specifically at moms. Why is that?

Boseovski: Yeah, so moms are the primary attachment figure in most—there are different kinds of compositions of families, but in most families, mom is the primary attachment figure. Whichever maternal guardian she is, the person that young girls look to. And our daughters are watching us, that might be a little overwhelming, but if you think about the type of information they’re getting from you, it’s in your gestures, it is in the things that you say about your body. So if you are feeling fat one day and you’re saying that and your daughter is hearing that, that’s influencing her. When mom eats differently from the rest of the family because she’s dieting, that gets encoded even if nothing is said about that. She’s very influential. And one reason that we can encourage starting early in terms of developing a healthy body image is that that is the time when she’s most influential. That is a time when girls are observing her so much and so she can get ahead of all the influencers and all the media and all those cultural sorts of influences that are going to come into play a little bit later.

Gallagher: And I think oftentimes we think of body image as if it just developed independently in our own head without this social interaction process going on. And as a social psychologist, I see it as a fundamentally social process where there’s exchange going on. And since mom is the early influencer for little girls, mom is participating in helping daughter build her body image even from a young age. So we were looking around at what else was out there when we first became interested in this topic, and there just wasn’t much out there at all that treated this as an interaction between the primary influencer mom and the young daughter. So the social nature of this process is hugely important and has been overlooked.

Mills: Now you offer advice for parents of girls ages 3 to 10. How did you pick that particular age range?

Boseovski: Yeah, so as a developmental psychologist looking at early social emotional cognitive development, we know that there’s critical things happening in how the self is constructed during this time. So children develop a sense of who they are, something called a categorical self when they are very young. It starts with basic things. How old am I? Right? I’m a girl and I’m 3 years old. And already you are thinking about who you are, what activities you enjoy, what hobbies and skills you have, and then we have these influences on what you are supposed to believe about your gender, what girls can do, what boys can do. We have cognitive maturation happening over the course of these years that will affect how we have to convey information to you. We have a growing understanding of what it means to eat right, eating for nutrition, eating to be able to feel well, a growing understanding of what physical activity does for us.

And so these are the key times to really sort of hammer in appropriate sort of ways of thinking about the self-apportioning all of these pieces of you into this self-concept. And we know that’s growing over the course of early to late childhood in really key ways. And then of course we want to hit up the time when they’re emerging, preteen, tween years. And then you have peer and media influences coming in. And again, that’s going to be another critical time where you’re going to emphasize things like critical thinking around the media and understanding what you see on Instagram or whatever other social platform isn’t always real. It doesn’t represent typical people. These are not your role models probably for the most part. And so you’ve just got key social, emotional, cognitive development happening.

You have emergence of complex emotions as they get older, so they start to feel shame. And certainly for girls, all of the body messages that they hear, we need to work through those emotions and work through the messages that they’re hearing with them as they’re happening. The popular thing has been to hand girls a book when they’re preteens and already so much of the self has developed and so many of those messages have already been taken in. And we’re saying actually we can preempt that. We can build a stronger self and say, I’m going to hear these messages, but I can actually actively choose to reject these messages. I can construct a self that is stronger than what I’m hearing out there.

Mills: Dr. Gallagher, let me ask you, what should moms and maybe even dads be saying to their daughters early on to help them develop a positive body image?

Gallagher: Well, one thing is to talk about the body in ways that appreciate its function. And that’s when you’re talking about the body, but certainly talk about the girl in terms of the other qualities that make her who she is and who you love. So many times with my own daughter, when people would meet her when she was a young girl for the first time, they would say, oh, you’re so pretty. And that’s wonderful. Compliments certainly, and they were well intentioned, but they were immediately drawing out the focus or putting the focus on her physical appearance instead of getting to know her and who she is and how smart she is and the clever things she does. All of that is so much more important than talking about appearance. So kids are watching us much earlier than we think they are. And so being careful about how we talk about other people and making sure that we aren’t talking about them in terms of their appearance or their bodies, because hopefully we all understand that there’s so much more than that, as Janet was saying a little bit ago.

And also making sure that when we see things on television together that we’re watching or out in public, that we help girls interpret that and understand it appropriately. And again, just making sure that we are taking the focus off of appearance and putting on other aspects of who people are that are so much more important. We also want moms to not be doing things like talking negatively about themselves. I can’t believe how much weight I’ve gained or I look terrible in these jeans. I can’t go out on the beach because I don’t like the way I look in my swimsuit. All of those with a little girl who’s watching you is directing her thoughts to, well, I hadn’t been thinking previously about how I look in a swimsuit, but now do I look bad in my swimsuit too? So just managing the types of things that we say about other people and ourselves and making sure they’re not negative, but also making sure that they’re not overly focused on appearance in the body.

Mills: But what do you say to your daughter when that stranger or friend or other family member says, oh, you’re so pretty.

Boseovski: Yeah, that’s an interesting one because we don’t want to offend family members. And we talk about that in the book, like strategies for when grandma or grandpa comes over and they talk about she’s such a pretty little girl. And we encourage family, we encourage moms to have direct contact with family members and conversations about, I’m really trying to help Amy’s math skills, and it would be wonderful if you compliment her on these things that she’s working on. And same with your daughter. So when someone says that to her, it’s partly her understanding that while it is a compliment and she can certainly take it graciously, that that doesn’t mean that she has to consider it as very important—that she can just let it go, but she can also point out other things that she’s working on and redirect the conversation and learn to do that.

We encourage women to do that. Women engage in fat talk. I feel so fat. Oh, you’re not fat. Who’s fat? Who’s gained weight? This is something that culturally we’ve almost been taught to do, and that’s applauded, right? And so again, it’s about consciously steering the conversation away from that and we see body image as something that women can direct themselves. But I don’t think our generation learned that we just sort of received the messages and now we’re saying, actually, we have the power to say no, we reject this and we want to teach girls that they have the power to do that.

Mills: You’ve alluded to the fact that the moms, that women, adults struggle with their own body image. And in the book you use a phrase “normative discontent” that sums it up. Being unhappy with your body is basically seen as normal for women. How can mothers help their daughters build a healthy body image when it’s probably something that they themselves are struggling with?

Gallagher: That’s a great question because we do acknowledge in the book that mom’s body image development is ongoing as well. This is not something that ends when she becomes an adult and her body’s going to go through changes continuously as well, like prepartum and postpartum and menopause, for example. And so moms are at different points when they are doing the parenting and having these interchanges with their daughters. So certain things might be coming to one mom’s mind that is not troubling another mom’s mind. But one of the things that we think is beneficial here is that if we treat this as a habit and work on it as ways of talking about our body or orienting toward our body and making sure that those are respectful, that becomes habitual and it becomes a way of thinking that can benefit moms wherever they are in their current adult development of body image as well. So we think that this has benefits not only for the daughter in teaching her and actively and intentionally modeling for her how she should treat her body, that moms will in turn come to treat their bodies in this way as well.

Mills: So it’s never too late to learn.

Gallagher: We think not. No, hopefully for all of us.

Mills: Let’s dig into some of the science of child development, which is important to the crux of your whole book. And you talk about three age ranges. You’ve got 3 to 4, 5 to 7, and 8 to 10. So can we break this down and then talk first about the youngest? What is important to know developmentally about 3- and 4-year-olds when you’re thinking about starting to build a healthy body image?

Boseovski: Yeah. Well first we’ll be realistic. They’re 3 and 4, so they can’t hold a lot of information in mind. So not to put too much pressure on moms who are thinking, I mean, come on, right? Look at this, right? They’re very intelligent, but they cannot process of course information the way that adults do. The key thing, I’ll say first that crosscuts all of these ages is, and the literature supports this at any age, is not focusing on the weight of the child and the body shape of the child. There can be an inclination if you feel like your child is heading toward being overweight or you’re concerned to say things. Those things are unhelpful. The literature has established that very well. So we discourage that when children are 3 and 4—girls are 3 and 4, we want to already be looking at things like gender stereotypes and debunking those.

So girls are told stuff like she’s so delicate, the frilly dresses, all of those things. And there’s nothing wrong with showing those sides of course, of girlhood, but we want to encourage the other sides being adventurous. We want to encourage descriptions about strong. We want to also take the focus off of appearance based descriptions, right? Look at how well you jump. I’m so impressed at how hard you worked on that drawing, things like that, because this age group really divides the world in terms of good things and bad things. The other thing we want to try to do is not promote good and bad with food. That food is good or bad for you. Food is food, it’s energy. Certainly some foods have more nutritional value. We all know this, but we don’t want to start instilling shame and morality around food because that’s where down the line you start to get into trouble.

Again, going back to your introduction, I was good today because of what I ate or didn’t eat. And so those kinds of messages are important, not having food morals. And then we also talk about body respect, which is learning early the habits of taking care of your body. And at 3 and 4, it’s enjoying movement. Movement is fun. It’s not supposed to be punitive, it should be something that we enjoy. So in this youngest group, those are the kinds of things that we emphasize doing. We have actual suggestions for activities and things that moms can do with their daughters books that they can read together, but really just getting away from gender stereotypes and also broadening and exploring the concept of the self beyond appearance.

Mills: But if you’re a mom of a girl about that age and she starts getting into the whole Disney princess thing, should you be worried?

Boseovski: Yeah, that’s a great question. And we delved into that literature a little bit in the book, and it’s no one that’s going to cause a problem. We do know girls have a preference for the certain type of doll, right? The stereotypical beautiful white thin doll. And we ideally want to provide a wider variety of toys. We want to have a variety of exposure to movies that they’re watching, and they are actually broader these days. So the research is kind of mixed on the effects, and I think it’s mixed because in parenting, if you see a diversity of things, if you present your child with a diversity of things, then that’s going to help. If you are careful about conversations around these kinds of characters and you dialogue with your daughter about these things, that’s also helpful. So we don’t really take an approach of ruling anything out completely. It’s really the total package that matters the most because I mean they do love their Disney princesses.

Gallagher: And that’ll be an important part of relating to their peers is knowledge about out those Disney princesses because their friends will be talking about those things. So we don’t raise little children that are going to be excluded from their peer groups because that’s very important for them too. So I think it’s just more about responsible consumption of those types of media.

Mills: So when we get to the age group, 5 to 7, what changes?

Boseovski: So now they’re exposed a little bit more to the outside world. They’ve started school, the schedule is a little more structured. They’re being exposed to more people. And so here we talk about learning about gender roles outside of the home, your home composition, but you’re going to see the kinds of jobs that people do, the kinds of discussions that your peers have. And so you’re still continuing to facilitate and monitor ideas about gender. You want to encourage activities that are suitable for all genders that are not necessarily sex typed. Girls at this age become more sensitive to inside personality characteristics. So not just behaviors, but inner characteristics. So starting to facilitate those, look at how creative you are or you’re such a kind person. And so you’re building that self-concept irrespective again of what she looks like for some kids.

You start to see sort of the bullying that can come with looking a little bit different. We always talk about as a developmental psychologist that there can’t be any place for bullying. That is when if you’re seeing that sort of thing, parents need to be reporting that to school authority so that there has to be a zero tolerance policy for things like that. It’s a great idea to get girls involved in a sport. It’s kind of fun to watch kids of this age try to play a sport, but that encourages leadership being part of a team. And again, by doing that activity, you’re just enjoying the activity and you’re not thinking about what you look like. You’re just out there in it. And how freeing is that? You’re paying attention a little bit more to the type of media that you expose her to. So parents have different views on what children can watch, but of course you should be watching.

And here you also start to see a little bit of the emergence of emotions like shame, the self-conscious emotions. It’s mostly reserved for the next group, but again, depending on your child. So some kids are very sensitive, some kids less. So you usually know what kid you have, what girl you have, and that’s where too, if there are comments about her body that make her feel shame, it’s important to address those and say that comments that other people make about you are their problem. They’re inappropriate and they really have nothing to do with you. And so those kinds of feelings are understandable, but that does not reflect your personhood and that should not be part of the fabric of who you are.

Mills: And then when we get to the ages 8 to 10, what changes?

Boseovski: Yes. Oh wow. So this one is quite different because now you’re dealing with much more influence of peers. It’s not that mom is no longer influential, but the peers are now taking more control over the social context. There’s more exposure to media. So again, watching what they’re consuming and starting to have critical conversations about what they’re seeing and how it represents women. And is this okay or not, okay, is this real? Is this not real? It’s a pre-puberty time. Girls develop at very different rates. We want to prepare them for the change that’s going to happen in their body because that’s where a lot of these self-conscious emotions like shame really come into play. And we want to preempt that by saying body changes are perfectly normal. They’re going to happen throughout your entire life. This is the beginning of it. It might feel uncomfortable, it probably will feel uncomfortable. And that’s okay. And everybody’s feeling that way, even though it doesn’t seem that way, right? Because the early developing girls are upset that they’re developing early, the late developing girls are jealous that the early developers are getting attention and nobody’s happy with where they are.

We also see at this age a decline in their self-concept positivity. So that’s been documented in the literature where they were once more optimistic about themselves and about other people. There’s a bit of a decline because now it’s seeing the harsh reality of the world a little bit more. And you’re also learning in school that maybe you’re not the best at everything. Maybe someone is better at math or better at this, and you start engaging in social comparison. So now we have a whole host of other things to sort of handle and talking about how to work on your skills and not compare yourself to other people. So talking about the physical, but also talking about these emotions they might be having around feeling inadequate in general is going to be really important.

And in this age group, you can definitely start emphasizing holistic health more because they know a lot more about biological processes, they understand food a lot better. So you want to really emphasize that you live in your body and you may not love your body every day, and that’s totally fine, but you will should always care and have respect for your body and have the behaviors that are associated with that. And again, that’s bringing in the health behavior without that physical appearance piece, we don’t need to have in order to have the health behavior benefit. And we think that’s an important thing to educate girls. A lot of people have called for more education for children around health literacy.

Mills: Now, you stopped at age 10. Doesn’t girls’ attention to their bodies really take off when they hit puberty? So I’m not going to accuse you of taking the easy route, but is that your next book?

Boseovski: So one of the reasons that we didn’t focus on that is there are books that focus on that particular period, and our perspective is that’s great, but a lot of the damage so to speak, or a lot of the influence has already happened. So in our view, it must start earlier, especially in the culture that we’re living in now, where we were pummeled with this information, we didn’t even have social media, and now it’s just coming at you from every single direction as a girl. And so this is why we felt we needed to fill that niche and we needed specifically to deal with that early mother and daughter relationship.

Gallagher: Yeah, mom will still be important of course in the adolescent years, but relative to peers in the media, her influence has now taken a little bit of a backstage presence. And so when we were looking at what else was out there, there is a lot of good resources out there about media consumption, social media consumption, and the influence of peers. So we just really saw this spot that was unaccounted for, which was the early years when mom has the most influence over the daughter and hopefully can inoculate her from some of the stuff that will hit in puberty and beyond.

Mills: That makes a lot of sense. Now let’s talk about food and eating. There are so many messages in our culture that emphasize thinness for girls and women. So how can moms of very young children help them navigate those messages and feel good about themselves?

Boseovski: Yeah, that’s a tough one because not only do you have those messages, you also have a lot of just picky eating in some kids and particularities, right? And in certain children, I think a lot of it is modeled in the home. We know from research that providing options for kids is really important, and that means providing options for all foods and not ruling out certain foods at the same time, learning to impose restrictions of where you’re sort of using induction that you do with kids where it’s kind of asking a question and setting a rule at the same time. Is it a good idea to eat this cupcake right now? That type of thing where it’s not that the cupcake is good or bad, but there are times for cupcakes and times that maybe you shouldn’t be having that cupcake because it’s almost time for bed or you’ve already had two cupcakes, and how are you going to feel?

You can model appropriate behavior by having family mealtimes where possible. That’s certainly not possible for all family compositions, but that’s been shown to be very helpful, not overemphasizing that something is healthy, even though it’s tempting to do that, that often backfires. It’s good for you, eat it, right? That’s compelling. So really just presenting different options, having children get involved in meal preparation as they get older so that they have some choices, but also allowing for preferences. Some children don’t like certain foods and they don’t have to every single vegetable, they don’t have to every single thing. So also just letting them be their own person and not being overly rigid, but trying to offer a wide variety of foods and trying to discuss how you feel and why during a sports activity you might eat this type of food, but at a birthday party of course you’re going to have cake and you should have cake if you want the cake, right? Things like that. So differentiating between everyday eating versus special occasion eating, and that can be done without emphasizing diet culture at all. So those are kind of the key pieces there.

And movement comes down to things like modeling, again, behavior as a family, going for walks, participating in activities you enjoy and not presenting it as something that is punishing, which I think for so many girls and women, athletics became unappealing because it was associated with you’re doing this to account for the chocolate bar you ate, which is again, not the message we want. We want you to find movement that makes you feel good in your body and that is good for your body. And you can model a wide variety of behaviors. You can hike and walk as a family. We talk about a lot of cheap and free things you can do. There’s YouTube fun dance videos. It’s really about instilling the value again for them of I enjoy this thing, plus it’s also good for me. But the modeling behavior for those things, and especially for eating too, is going to be critical. And some of it too is they’re influenced by what their peers eat,

And you’re just going to have to sort of work through that. If everybody has this snack in their lunchbox, suddenly your child is interested in that snack. And we can give into some of those things shortly.

Mills: Well, what about dads and other males who might be in the household, especially brothers? I grew up with two brothers, and one way that they could really get me was to call me fat. That was a big tease. How can they help with body positivity and what can moms do? What can the readers of your book do to work with the men in their lives?

Gallagher: Well, first of all, moms need to let dad in on this focus that we’re now going to have, which is not on appearance and not on body shape. So getting dad on board with not talking about other people’s bodies and how they look, that’s going to be important. And dad’s also talking with their daughters about things other than how pretty they are. So some of the same advice that we’ve been giving to moms here is just as applicable for fathers.

Now, brothers are a tougher case and Janet may want to comment on the brothers, but for many of the same things that we’re talking about for moms to change, we want dads to do that as well. So when dad’s watching football or other sports, maybe not drawing attention to the way that people’s bodies look and talking about the functions instead, Wow, how strong that person is or look at that flip they did. That’s amazing. Instead of commenting on appearance.

Boseovski: Yeah, it’s tricky because there’s less research on men and certainly on siblings as well. And so we did try to dig up what there is. Fathers are influential. If fathers focus on obsession with appearance, then actually there is an influence on daughters if they comment on their daughter’s weight. Again, weight comments are a no-no. So having an agreement within the family, and that means getting siblings on board and actively saying, in this house we don’t comment on people’s weight. That could be a conversation for the doctor, the pediatrician, if that’s a necessity medically, but otherwise we don’t focus on that in this house. And so if a sibling is doing that, that sibling needs to be taught to be respectful.

We do think that there could be ideally a book written for boys about how to navigate the culture of girls and women too, and for boys too, to be fair. I mean there are demands on their own body image. We couldn’t cover that. Again, not a lot of literature. I have a doctoral student examining ideas about muscularity and male masculinity and ideas that boys get from things like Marvel comics. So they have their own pressures that are happening. They’re not as strong, certainly they’re not as pervasive as what we see for women. But teaching boys to be sensitive through their own experience of that. If you’re the skinny, gangly kid who’s being made fun of as a boy, well all too well the pain of that. But showing the respect for other people, and again, putting the emphasis on who we are as people and having just sort of house rules and explaining that when you leave the house, not everyone has those rules, but those are things you can take with you. Other people can do what they wish. You’re not here to lecture to other people to talk about weight or not to talk about weight, but you can decide these are our values and this is what we do and this is our thing. And again, that’s like a protective barrier. You don’t have to let it become part of you.

Mills: Let’s talk for a minute about cultural differences. Do you offer advice from moms and daughters from different racial or ethnic backgrounds, or does the same advice apply no matter what background you have?

Gallagher: I think the same general advice applies, which is celebrating and emphasizing other aspects of your self concept in your appearance. But certainly looking into the literature, we found that there are different specific appearance concerns between various cultural or racial groups. So the specific concerns are going to be different that need to be addressed. Is this an issue around weight that the girl is talking about or that the mom is talking about? Is this an issue about hair or about skin condition or there’s just a variety of special topics that differ by group, but the fundamentals there are the same, which is that sort of taking the investment out of our appearance and putting that in other aspects of ourself is beneficial for everybody.

Mills: What should you do about other close figures in your kids’ lives? Say you’ve got a grandparent or a family friend who is sending unhelpful messages. Do you talk to the individual who’s doing it? Do you talk just to your daughter? Do you let it slide? I mean, how should people navigate those situations?

Boseovski: Yeah, ideally, again, depending on the age of the child and then depending on the nature of the relationship with the person, is this the person that you see frequently? Is this the person that the child is exposed to all the time? If it’s an all the time sort of thing and the relationship is close, then we would encourage parents to say, yeah, I’m really working on this sort of thing with her and this is why. And the way to do it is to say, could you help? Not to say you’re doing something wrong, but to just say, we’re really trying to emphasize these kinds of skills in Kim, for example, and it would be so helpful for you to talk about those things with her and try to reinforce the positive versus pointing out the negative, which is what we do in parenting. So it’s almost like you’re trying to enforce or use that strategy, but I think being direct about it is fine.

And then from the daughter’s end, explaining that again, some people will bring these things to you because we are in a world where people focus a lot on how people look. So you’re going to hear things and people will say things again, it’s up to you, how do you want to take that information if you see your appearance as a small part of yourself, and this should not hurt you. And that’s our goal here, is we’re building someone who is broader than that, who if they receive a comment like that, that’s not going to carry their day because they are a strong person with interests and skills and talents. And so here’s this person that comes along and says something pretty superficial about you. Maybe it’s upsetting, maybe it’s actually not. Maybe it’s flattering either way. The message is the same that you can kind of let it roll off and it doesn’t change who you are or how your value as a person.

But yes, I think we need to sort of explain it to girls too, because I think the first time any girl gets that type of comment, especially if it’s embarrassing, it’s jarring. Someone singles you out often publicly, oh, she has her father’s legs or something like that. And people do that and they think it’s harmless, but you don’t know how that’s being interpreted. You don’t know if there’s a fraught relationship there. There’s so many reasons why it’s just not a great idea to say those kinds of things. And you might even have it in your head as a compliment, but it isn’t taken that way or it’s misunderstood. And so things like that, you want to explain that people will say these things and we don’t have to hate those people or be mad at them. We can just again, choose how we interpret that information because as Ashleigh was saying before, we exist in the social sphere, we need to get along with people. So we’re not going to walk around lecturing everybody about body image. It’s more that for us internally, we’ve learned how to protect ourselves and how to handle those little things that come our way.

Gallagher: I think a big key here is teaching the girl to be intentional about what she lets in and what she keeps out. Oftentimes we act as if body image just happens to us or our views about our body or our appearance just kind of happened to us. But we can take an active role in that. And that’s a huge emphasis in our book is not treating this as a passive process, but rather seeing yourself as the manager of your own self-concept and your body image. And so teaching her from the early age that you don’t just have to take this and you don’t just have to accept what others say or what they do. You’re in charge of thinking about how your body, the way that you want to do it.

Mills: And just to wrap up, you had to read a lot of literature in order to write this book, and I’m wondering, as you were digging through, did you come up with sort of dead ends or there areas where you feel like we really need a lot more research?

Boseovski: Oh yeah. I mean, if you look at just the compositions of different kinds of families, we don’t know much about that, right? It’s usually the nuclear traditional family, a lot more about different cultures and culture pressures integrating into the regular world. And then if you’re part of any kind of subculture or ethnic minority, how do you handle those issues? Issues around boys and men issues around fathers and daughters. A lot of fathers are just not comfortable, and then it is left to mom. In our focus group, a lot of moms talked about things like that where it’s kind of on them, and that’s a lot of pressure, but men also feel like, Oh, wait, is this my topic? This is a little uncomfortable to talk about my daughter and her body with her, so what do I do? And that it can get all awkward, understandably so I think in all of those arenas, we need good scientific research. I mean, you can find tons of advice on social media from all of the influencers, but the bottom line is we need the science. We need systematic work on all of this stuff so we can actually steer people in the right direction.

Mills: Alright, well, I want to thank you both for joining me. This has been really interesting. I’m sure our listeners are going to learn a lot from hearing you and potentially reading your book. Thank you. 

Gallagher: Thank you.

Boseovski: Thanks so much for having us.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.