***Editor’s Note: Katie Hurley, creator of “No More Mean Girls: The Secret to Raising Strong, Confident and Compassionate Girls,” is a toddler and adolescent psychotherapist in Los Angeles. She focuses on work with tweens, teenagers and younger adults.***
Ads selling unattainable weight reduction targets and food plan tradition have been more and more frequent on social media platforms, notably focusing on younger ladies and ladies. This pattern has led to a surge in consuming issues, notably amongst adolescent ladies. This unhealthy and unrealistic messaging isn’t restricted to social media; it additionally pervades TV, fashionable tradition, colleges, social actions, and public areas. Pressure to comply with dangerous dietary traits like clear consuming and calorie restriction is resulting in meals nervousness and an obsessive concentrate on weight reduction amongst teenagers.
However, dad and mom can play an important function in guiding their teenagers in the direction of a more healthy relationship with meals. Modeling wholesome consuming habits, consciously avoiding unhealthy physique discuss, and working towards open and sincere communication are key in combating the poisonous food plan tradition. Encouraging essential pondering expertise and instructing media literacy may also help teenagers navigate and query the deceptive messages they’re uncovered to.
By establishing an open and sincere dialogue round these subjects, dad and mom can present help and steerage to their teenagers in an emotionally more healthy approach. The vacation season, specifically, presents a chance for households to share meals and make recollections which might be centered on nourishing connections reasonably than dangerous food plan tradition.