Little Girls Who Body-Shame

It finally happened — the thing I’ve been dreading since I heard “it’s a girl” for the first time. Another girl body-shamed my daughter.

But not the daughter I expected, my oldest, the one wading her way through awkward prepubescence. No, it was my youngest, Charlotte, who’s only in kindergarten.

I was there when it happened. I do lunch duty at the school once a week, which has given me a chance to get to know the kids in my daughters’ class. The kindergarteners are still figuring out the whole social interaction thing, and they’re forever telling me that so-and-so said this or that or called them this or that. These insults are almost always fairly innocuous, and my response is always the same: be kind to each other, work it out, don’t tattle.

But when my oldest daughter came running up to me and said that one of the kindergarteners was saying something about Charlotte’s butt, it didn’t sound innocuous. I immediately made a beeline for the kindergarten table, where I saw my daughter hunched over on the bench with a bright red face and tears streaming down her face.

The other kids were totally ignoring her. There was space large enough for a child on either side of her. I will never forget the sight of her, totally isolated, hunching her small shoulders forward to try and make herself even smaller, hurt and humiliation boiling up in hot tears and rolling down her cheeks.

I’ll also never forget the sight of Sienna marching over to the offender, yelling at her, and raising her hand like she was going to strike the girl who hurt her sister. I managed to grab her hand and intervene, but not before I felt identical anger welling up inside me at the same instant, and an identical desire for vengeance.

I made the little girl tell me what she had said, dismissing her first few attempts to water it down. I stayed calm while I explained how very wrong and cruel it is to tell someone they have a fat butt, and how unkind it is to talk about other people’s bodies. I told her to apologize to Charlotte twice over, once for being mean, and once for lying. It seemed imperative in the moment that I make it clear to Charlotte that she does not have a fat bottom, and I thought a retraction from the offender would be more memorable than assurances from me.

I may have stayed calm, but I was pissed. Actually I was rage mommy on the inside, full of white-hot anger at the kid who hurt my kid. I’m still angry about it, especially since my intervention seemed to have changed nothing. Twice this week Charlotte has come home and reported that other girls have called her fat again, or told her that she has fat cheeks. But if I’m being honest, I ought to be just as angry with myself.

It kills me to see my little girl look critically at herself in the mirror, trying to flatten her cheeks out with her hands. It kills me to hear her wish aloud that she didn’t have “fat cheeks”. It kills me that she doesn’t see how precious she is. I wish I could make her understand that her face might not look like the other little girls’ faces, but that’s part of what makes it so beautiful.

And yet I do the same thing. I look at my reflection and suck in my stomach, frowning, turning sideways, shaking my head, wishing I could hate away the roundness and the jiggle. Even when I’m doing everything right, the exercising, the healthy eating, the moderate portions, I have a consistently negative body image. It’s never it looks better than it did — it’s always, it doesn’t look good enough. My husband tells me I’m beautiful, and I say, but. Not thanks, not I love you…but. But my pants are too tight, but I’ve put on so much weight, but my arms look huge. I don’t even need someone else to body-shame me — I’ve got it covered all on my own, thanks.

This isn’t the first time I’ve come to this realization. I’ve known for years that there is no way for me to raise my kids with healthy body images while mine is so unhealthy. But this is the first time I’ve really gotten why my husband gets so upset when I hate-critique myself in the mirror. It actually hurts to see someone you love not love themselves.

Little girls who body-shame others grow up to be women who body-shame themselves. Little girls who get body-shamed grow up to be women who body-shame themselves. And women who body-shame themselves raise their daughters to do the same thing. It’s a vicious cycle and it’s hard to break, even though I know how much it hurts. Maybe it will help, though, to see it from the outside-in instead of feeling it from the inside-out.

If being kind to myself might help this little girl remember that she is beautiful when the world tells her that she’s not, it doesn’t seem like such a hard thing, really.