Female adolescents usually have to bear the brunt of the pressure to look good, and with current standards on feminine beauty bordering on the absurd your teenage daughter may have a hard time to keep up with such an impossible goal. The mass media is littered with females having wispy, slim bodies, and soft core models who are porn stars in their own right flaunt airbrushed bodies which may paint an unrealistic picture of the female physique. Naturally, your teenager's self-image would pale in comparison to such perfection, and in order to nip this mistaken notion in the bud, you have to wage a campaign against believing the media hype.
Apart from the eye candy and the trinkets of trendy teen magazines which gush out in living color from the newsstands, your daughter is also bombarded with images of skinny women who is far from the normal appearance of the average woman. Most of the time, the pictures of models which rival even the porn stars in explicitness go through extensive retouching and recontouring before it meets the publication's 'eye-catching' standards, but for your teenager it is a holy grail which is all but attainable.
Besides, the modeling industry has an unwritten code which puts a limit on how much a model can actually weigh, and this can be as little as twenty-three percent of the weight of an average woman. The final products of such standards are unfortunately peddled for truth at the 3000+ media ads in circulation every day.
You might have an idea on where the road leads for a teenager with such a skewed image of beauty, a broken self-image coupled with an intense desire to look like those in the print ads and the TV commercials. For some, this may lead to eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia nervosa, with the media's emphasis on beauty as equivalent to thinness.
Unfortunately, not everyone is blessed with body types like those of runway models or porn stars, and you have to make it clear to your daughter that beauty isn't really skin deep. You can also reduce the impact of the media on your daughter's body image by taking a few relevant steps.
You may want to monitor your teen's magazine subscription. Some are just too concentrated on the transient flash of teenage beauty, and practically provides lip service to things that matter the most (like brains and substance to go with a pleasant personality). In contrast, there are also magazines which tackle the female issues with empathy. Subscribe more with such publications rather than those which delve in the superficial aspects of femininity.
You can also involve yourself in an awareness program in your daughter's school, and talk to her about the dangers of getting too thin from a parent's loving point of view. You can also discuss to your daughter the realities of the modeling industry, how models usually have set physical standards which are too high to attain, and how the pictures in their ads are routinely altered to look thinner than they really are. Your daughter may have a distorted view of her body, but you can at least set the record straight with proper and loving information.
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