By Jacqueline Maley, March 9, 2005
Girls as young as five are dissatisfied with their bodies and wish they were thinner, research has found.
In a survey of 81 girls aged five to eight, researchers from Flinders University found 46.9 per cent wanted to be skinnier, and 45.7 per cent said they would diet if they put on weight.
“An awareness of body image was originally thought to develop around adolescence but it’s getting younger and younger,” said researcher Hayley Dohnt.
The study, published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, found older girls were more likely to yearn for slimmer bodies, with about 71 per cent of the seven-year-olds surveyed saying they wanted a slighter figure.
The girls, recruited from two South Australian private schools, were also acutely aware of the connection between popularity and body weight, Ms Dohnt said.
“We found a large majority said that children would play with a thinner figure and they wouldn’t play with the larger figure.”
The girls were asked what they thought their peers wished to look like and there was a significant correlation between that and the girls’ desires for themselves.
“Peer norms are in place in girls as young as six and seven,” Ms Dohnt said. “They all know being thinner is the thing to do in society.”
The pressures of media, parents and peers meant young children were becoming increasingly aware of beauty ideals, Ms Dohnt said. It was important to address unhealthy body images early, because it could lead to low self-esteem, depression and eating disorders in later life.
“Body image and body dissatisfaction is developing a lot earlier than we thought. Parents and teachers need to be aware of this.”
Dr Michael Kohn, medical director of the eating disorder program at The Children’s Hospital, Westmead, said more pre-adolescent children had been presenting with eating disorders in the past 10 years.
“[Pre-teens] are less sophisticated and more concrete than their older peers,” Dr Kohn said. “They tend to be much more rigid and black-and-white in their thinking. They have relatively simple associations.”
Dr Kohn said younger patients were more likely to restrict their eating and exercise obsessively, but did not purge their food as often as adolescent patients.
Body image issues were not restricted to girls, Dr Kohn said. His last three pre-teen patients had been seven-year-old boys. He said peer pressure and harassment about weight was a serious problem in school playgrounds.
