Blog Archive
Posts tagged with Body Image
Wanting your child to be healthy is reasonable. But teaching them to monitor their weight is not necessary to support that goal. Weight can be one piece of medical information, but it does not tell the whole story of a child’s health. At home, focusing on habits, well-being, and how your child feels can support…
Being thoughtful about weight, dieting, and body talk around your child is not being too sensitive, and it does not teach your child to be fragile. These messages can shape how kids think about food, health, and their bodies, while eating disorders can have serious and even deadly consequences.
What does healthy mean for kids? It means supporting their physical and emotional well-being without steering them toward a particular weight, size, or appearance. Parents can focus on offering a variety of foods, making movement enjoyable, encouraging body respect, and helping children learn to trust themselves.
Boys can struggle with body image even when they do not talk about it openly. As a parent, you can help by watching for changes in eating or exercise, listening without judgment, and avoiding comments that place value on body size or muscularity. If these concerns cause distress or begin interfering with daily life, reach…
If your daughter makes negative comments about their body, begin by listening without criticizing or rushing to correct them. Avoid making appearance the focus, praise qualities unrelated to looks, discuss what their body allows them to do, and help them create a healthier social media feed. Small, ongoing conversations can help girls develop a more…
Most of us were never taught how to have a healthy relationship with our bodies. So figuring out how to teach kids to love their bodies, especially on the days when you're not loving your own, can feel really hard.
Comments about weight show up in everyday life more often than we realize. They slip into compliments, jokes, health conversations, and even the way adults talk about their own bodies. Most of the time, these comments are unintentional, shaped by the language many of us grew up hearing. For kids, though, these moments matter.
My name is Elle Jones, I’m 18 and was one of the WithAll 2021 summer interns. Throughout the summer, I worked on a project focused on infusing youth voices into WithAll’s What to Say program. Research shows that what adults say matters, but WithAll wanted to hear from teens like me how it matters and…
We all want our kids to have a healthy relationship with food and their bodies. But in today's world, it can be increasingly difficult to know how to best support children's physical and mental health. As a parent, you have a powerful opportunity to shape the way your children think about and feel in their…
GLP-1 medications — the category that includes Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound — were originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes. They’re now widely marketed for weight loss. And if you’ve noticed the ads, so have your kids. Here’s what WithAll’s Executive Director thinks parents need to know.
Doctors can be excellent partners in helping kids develop positive body image and food relationships. We partnered with one of the family physicians in our What to Say Network to share the top advice she gives to parents for supporting kids’ health at home. Here’s what she had to say:
Kids notice everything: who gets seconds, who “needs” more exercise, whose lunch is commented on, whose isn’t. Even when you’re trying to help, it’s easy for one child to feel like the child with “the problem.”