What is Body Image and how does it affect self esteem in teenagers?
Many people do not have a clear concept of what body image is. They hear the term thrown around without any concrete explanation as to what it means. Simply put, body image is how a person perceives himself or herself. Today, the ease of access to mass media and constant inundation with unrealistic images at exceedingly younger ages leads impressionable youth to form distorted ideas about what a normal person should look like.
In fact, according to the TV-Turnoff Network, research has shown that in the course of one week, children and teens watch nearly 28 hours of television and is exposed to over 11 hours of various media each day. With such an over-whelming amount of media, that portrays unrealistic ideals of what the perfect person should look like invading the minds of young impressionable people, is it any wonder that more children than ever before have poor body images, a major cause in low self esteem in teenagers.
The Effects on Our Teen Girls
A poor teenage self image can have a devastating effect on their sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Sixty-five percent of American females have admitted to unhealthy eating habits and breast augmentation has sky-rocketed nearly 600% between 1997 and 2007 amongst teen-aged girls under the age of eighteen based on the stats of the Women’s Media Center. Sadly, nearly 50% of adolescent girls know someone with an eating disorder.
Hitting puberty can often exponentially increase a girl’s negative body image. With the vast majority of media only portraying extremely slender, often stick-like, women, the physical changes that young women go through can make them increasingly unhappy with their bodies. Young ladies become curvaceous and weight-gain is natural when they go through puberty. This is incongruent with what is shown on TV, billboards, magazines, and advertisements. Female models are usually around 5’10” tall and weigh around 110 pounds while the average American female stands at 5’4” and weighs approximately 144 pounds. This means that most models weigh 30 pounds less and about a half-foot taller than the vast majority of females that view them.
The Effects on Our Teen Boys
Unfortunately, teen-aged boys are not escaping this epidemic either. Girls worry about being too big in comparison to other females, but young men have the opposite problem. Mass media portrays men that are strikingly tall and with extremely muscular bodies, which is completely unrealistic and makes up a very small minority of men in the country.
This has led boys to believe that if they do not fit into this ideal of muscularity and fitness, then they will be considered weak and less of a man. It has become an increasing trend for young men to seek out performance enhancing drugs and steroids in an effort to achieve this ideal. According to a study conducted by Linda Smolak and her colleagues in 2005, somewhere between 7 and 11% of adolescent boys use steroids at one point or another in order to increase the tone and size of muscle. The rate of steroid usage by teen-aged boys is reported to be greater than 3% whereas anorexia is below one percent.
What Can Be Done About Teenage Self Image?
Negative body image is a big problem affecting both adolescent genders. A poor body image leads to low self-esteem and often-serious problems ranging from severe depression to eating disorders and drug abuse. Even though teens are constantly being told through mass media that their bodies are not good enough and that how a person looks is the only measure of self-worth and success, there are many things that people can do to promote healthy body images in adolescents.
Lead by example, don’t talk about your body in a negative way and be positive when speaking about theirs.
Try to limit media where you know your teens are seeing unrealistic images of bodies being photoshopped or the media is putting a negative slant on bodies.
Talk openly with teens about what they see in advertising and how they have been manipulated to look perfect. Go online and show them examples.
Love your Teen unconditional and accept their style even though it’s not yours.
It is important for teens to understand how the media targets them. With proper knowledge, they can then decipher what they see and combat the negative impacts that media can have on their body images and self-esteem and lead happy and healthy lives.
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Debra Beck is a devoted mother, sought-after presenter, author, and has spent over 20 years working with teens and their parents. She’s helped thousands of teen girls develop their self-esteem through her blog, one-on-one mentoring sessions, and mother-daughter retreats.
Her award-winning book My Feet Aren’t Ugly: A Girl’s Guide to Loving Herself was revised and updated for re-release in September 2011 with Beaufort Books.
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