Too much, too young

CELEBRITY designer Liz Hurley is in the firing line for selling teeny weeny children’s bikinis. Her latest swimwear range for eight to 13-year-old girls includes a leopard-print string bikini, the Cheetah Cha Cha, the Collette Bikini, a barely there top with a cheetah trim and the Tweeny Polly Bikini, a ruffled two-piece. The under-eight range also includes two-pieces and bikinis. The collection has been slammed by parents as being totally inappropriate.

Also in the spotlight for the wrong reasons is American singer and actress Jessica Simpson. While on a chat show recently, she showed off a picture of her four-month-old daughter wearing a tiny yellow crochet two-piece. The picture was followed by a flurry of angry internet comments.

Promoting a sexualised image of girls may seem to some as simply playing dress up, however, for children it can start a long and damaging negative association with their bodies.

“At a time when they are developing a sense of self, it’s not helpful for young girls and boys to be introduced to the adult world [concept] of what it means to be attractive. It can be difficult for children to filter out what these messages mean,” says Harriet Parsons, services coordinator of Bodywhys, an eating disorder support association.

“The message coming through is not as simple as: ‘if you look thinner then you are a better person’, it’s also that you will be happier and liked more.”

Sexualised images of young girls, says Parsons, perpetuates the ‘false connection’ between how you feel about yourself and how others see you.

A KIDSCREEN survey of children aged 12-18 years across 13 countries in 2006 found that Irish children ranked a worryingly low 12th place in their self-perception score. A year later, a study of Irish children and adolescents found that 1.2% of Irish girls may be at risk of developing anorexia and 2% were at risk of developing bulimia. At the most disturbing end of the spectrum, the Health Research Board in 2008 reported that eating disorders represented the second highest diagnosis of child and psychiatric admission in Ireland at 18%.

Parsons points out while negative distorted thinking about body image can lead to disordered eating thoughts, this does not necessarily cause an eating disorder.

Being conscious of weight and body size from a very young age may not be all that unusual, according to a Irish study which will be presented at the Psychological Society of Ireland Annual Conference in Cork in November.

Dr Samantha Dockray of the School of Applied Psychology at UCC recently supervised a research project which asked a group of Cork city children how they saw their bodies. A group of eight and nine-year-olds told researchers whether or not they were happy with how they looked and what their ideal size was. Dockray describes the results as ‘staggering’.

“We got the ratings most of them wanted to be thinner than they are. Interestingly girls wanted boys to be thinner, and boys want girls to be thinner,” says Dr Dockray.

“Normally, developmentally, we don’t expect eight andnine-year-old children to be thinking about those kinds of things, unless it’s a family issue, so that’s the most surprising aspect of it,” she says. And according to the academic, once this sort of thinking sets in at a young age, it is apt to endure.

“What we know about children, is that those kinds of thoughts about themselves, particularly critical thoughts tend to track into adolescence and adulthood. Over time they tend to intensify.”

That there are nine-year-olds in Cork City worrying about whether they are fat is disturbing enough in itself, but what is even more alarming about this study, is that many of the children who expressed a wish to be thinner were actually of normal size.

So what is giving these children the idea that it is better to be slimmer? Is it their families? Their friends? The images they see in films and on TV?

Dr Dockray says another recent Cork study may provide a clue as to what’s giving these ideas to children, or to little girls at least.

“A researcher I’m supervising, recently looked at premature sexualisation of girls, and did a whole range of surveys of girls 12 and under, and young women between 18 and 21, looking at who they ranked as role models. They clearly ranked media personalities/ celebrities, that is women not known for anything other than being famous, as their role models, over and above sports players, politicians and other well-known women within Ireland.

“Irish women didn’t get a ranking at all actually. The top two were Rihanna and Kim Kardashian, very sexualised young women. Women didn’t rank as influences, unless they had a very sexualised appearance in the media.”

Anyone familiar with the contents of a magazine stand will believe what Dr Dockray is saying. From Hilary Clinton to Aung San Suu Kyi and Katie Taylor, Angela Merkel to Mary McAleese, you can find images of strong, successful women across the media landscape, but it seems the role models young Irish women and girls most want to be are the ones we see every week in Grazia. If beauty comes from within anywhere these days, it’s within the light of celebrity.

Kim Kardashian is famous for her fame and for her curvy shape which photographers can’t seem to get enough of. Rihanna smokes cannabis openly, has terrible taste in boyfriends and tweets pictures of herself hooked up to an IV when she’s in hospital for ‘dehydration’. But it doesn’t stop girls from wanting to dress like her.

Check out the children’s section in our high street stores and you will find a celeb-driven selection of sheer tops, ripped leggings and teeny tiny denim shorts.

Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald has recently introduced guidelines for stores on appropriate clothing for children, but that doesn’t stop kids from wanting to wear them.

We wear what we feel good in, and that’s as true for young girls as it is for women. Whether or not we look good in the clothes we like to wear is another matter entirely, and who can say how much our celebrity-saturated, fame-worshipping television and media landscape is distorting what we see when we look in the mirror?

What Dr Dockray and her team are finding out is that young girls want to dress like their idols, even when their own bodies are significantly bigger than the women they are imitating. Obesity is on the rise here among young people, but 12-year-olds still want to wear what Rihanna is wearing.

Says Dr Dockray: “There’s lots of research done on how body dysmorphia intersects with the drive for thinness, but now its emerging where people don’t recognise they’re overweight. So you might see children dressing in the way they see very thin celebrities dressing, in clothes that aren’t designed for their body shape at all.”

* www.bodywhys.ie or email [e-mail]