Are We Really Shocked?

I read in the news today that most irish youngsters put looking good ahead of internal benefits gained by eating the right foods. It has shocked most parents but I am at a loss as to why? Surely our obsession with celebrities and their weight, skin, style and lifestyle habits is to blame for this mindset in our youngsters. The worlds interest in celeb waist sizes puts increasing pressure on young people, if a celeb dares to be any curvier than a size 00 they are harassed by the media into dropping the pounds fast. Most new mothers today kill themselves to get into their pre pregnancy skinny jeans and if they are unable to do so, in the celeb set time scale of six weeks, they blame themselves often ending up depressed and self loathing. Our children see this and react the way children do.

As adults we set a path and examples for our children to follow, often our children copy our own behaviour and habits. They have nobody else to learn from. So when a young girl sees her mother trawling through magazines and commenting that she would love to look as good as Kate Moss, its no wonder the girl will percieve this to be the norm and that looking good is the key to a happy successful life. What we should be explaining to our children is that celebrities and their size 00 frames are a direct result of being able to afford personal trainers and bouts of plastic surgery. We should be telling our children that these celebs may look good but that does not always mean they are blissfully happy. Most are on drugs or have some type of addiction. We do not show our children the pictures of celebs falling out of clubs, drugged up to the eye balls in the dead of night. The reason we don’t is because we want to protect them from the evils of the world and don’t want to make them aware of the bad things yet we are not protecting them by allowing them to percieve that their lives should be revolved around their jean size. Its not only young girls who have such hang ups.

We are hearing more and more about young men who fall into dangerous eating habits in order to look as good as the guy in the Calvien Klein ads. As a nation we are obsessed with beauty. More and More reality tv shows are hitting our screens where the name of the game is being beautiful determines how well you do. We never see anything about the contestants intellectual abilities. Parents know all of this and yet continue to allow their children to have the mindset that beauty is the key. They then feign shock when their four year old comments that being fat is horrible and that being skinny is cool. A lot of media publications claim to be in favour of the curvier healthier woman, take cosmopoliton for example. They print many features on how its better to be curvy yet still use size 00 models in their features. They even ran a feature on a size 12 girl and helped her achieve a size 10.

Her reward was a nationwide applause. It is hypocrisy at its highest form. If these media publications were of the view that we should be applauding curvy woman and loving our bodies regardless of size, as they claim to be, then they would make a point of using models who actually look like people. Children will learn what we teach them. We should be showing them all of the benefits of eating right, such as better concentration levels and haelthier internal organs. Instead we continue to bombard them with lollipop people and tell them that their looks will determine their future happiness. Todays revelations did not shock me, they just said aloud what most of us already think.