ABSTRACT
The term "body image" refers to an individual's perception, feelings, and attitudes toward his or her own body, or how he or she experiences the body psychologically. Your daughter's feelings and attitudes toward her body, her body image, incorporate the interest, caring, respect, and importance that you and others give her body when she is growing up. It is through her body that your daughter first came to know and experience herself as a distinct, separate entity in the world. For your daughter to have a healthy body image, she will need a good sense of body boundariesfeeling separate from but equal to others. She will also need a good role model. Both of these most often start with you, her mother. Dieting, starving, bingeing, and purging may be, among other things, attempts to defme and establish boundaries, in a void of other alternatives. As Richard Geist, a psychologist specializing in eating disorders, puts it:
The anorexic girl peers into the mirror of the mother and perceives not the reflection of her whole body self, but a prismatic image of isolated parts: Her stomach protrudes, her thighs are fat; her birthmark is too noticeable. Only when she allows mother to substitute the latter's "thing creation" does she feel whole and alive, and then only by sacrificing her uniqueness. 26
The influence of maternal attitudes on the daughter's body image was illustrated in the Glamour 27 magazine survey referred to earlier. The survey found that mothers who were critical of their daughters' bodies had daughters who showed a greater use of severe dieting practices, a higher incidence of bulimia, and a poorer body image.
