Pushing Our Girls Too Far

“You’re daughter is too skinny,” the doctor stated calmly, an almost accusatory look on her face. “You’re going to need to start feeding her more. How much milk does she drink a day?”

She was pointing at the little computer generated chart showing that my little amazon, at 7 years old and already standing at  4″2′ tall, only weighed around 47 lbs and had dropped out of her old spot somewhere along the 50th percentile for weight.  For those of you who don’t have kids, starting at birth these days your child is compared to pretty much every other child in the country to consider what’s average and what’s not. Just another way that we as a whole try to make our children normal. Except now we let doctors have a say in it.

And I didn’t really like what mine was saying right now.

The doctor keeps drilling me about what I feed her, how often I let her drink milk, even what kind of milk I give her. I try to explain my daughter is picky. She won’t even eat scrambled eggs, but the woman with the all of the medical degrees doesn’t seem to be buying it. By the time I go home with a list of recommended foods and things that I can do to help boost her caloric intake while avoiding junk food and too much fat I feel as though I’ve been accused of starving my child and wonder if I’ll get a call from children’s services over this.

My mother laughs when I call her, saying I’m just being to hard on myself. “You were the same way when you were younger. Even through High School. I swear if I hadn’t seen you eat I would think you never did.” I tell her she’s probably right, that I’m just being silly and we hang up a little later but I hardly feel better about it. It’s true I was an athletic child. I was on many teams through the seasons; softball, volleyball, field hockey. I even ran track as a relay sprinter for a time. Sure I was thin, but I put out a lot of energy, and ate a lot of it too. But my daughter barely seems to eat, and is no where near as active.

I try not to worry about it over the next few days, only enough to remind me to try the doctors recommendations. I start adding a scoop of dry milk powder to the whole milk I’ve started buying for her. Instead of just having apples for a snack she gets peanut butter to dip the slices in, or a yogurt smoothie to go with. I’ve even gone and started giving her those pediatric nutrition shakes you can find in the grocery stores. She notices the changes, and one day she comes to me with that cute, confused look that all children get when they are trying to figure out what makes their parents act so funny. Smiling and ruffling her hair I simply tell her that the doctor says she’s not getting enough calories, so I’m trying to make sure she eats more. I expect her next response to be ‘what are calories?’. To my surprise, it’s not.

“Calories are bad.” she states, wrinkling her nose as if I’d just asked her to drink a glass of bacon grease. “They make you fat.”

Now it’s my turn to have the funny look on my face. “Who told you that?” I ask her, a little flabbergasted that my first grader would know or even think such a thing. I remember children that age worrying about why homework was invented and hoping they didn’t catch cooties from the boys/girls. Not about if they were fat or not.

“Ali’s mom said. She won’t let us have any candy or soda at her house because they are full of calories and make you fat. She says if you don’t eat a lot you’ll stay skinny like me.” As she’s telling me I begin to realize exactly how little she’s been eating lately. The fights for her to finish dinner don’t consist of trying to talk her into eating her green beans, but to have a few more bites of the steak she barely touched. When she asks for seconds during a cook out she wants another ear of corn, but hasn’t touched the hot dog or the barbecue ribs on her plate. She’s stopped eating cereal and oatmeal all together, wanting only toast with juice for breakfast. When I try to give her a glass of milk, she tells me she’d rather drink water.

My seven year old has practically turned herself into a vegitarian because in her childhood wisdom everyone says vegetables are good for you, so that must be the only thing she eats to keep from getting fat.

After I send her outside to play I call the other mother to find out what exactly happened to put this idea in my childs head. She tells me about this fabulous new diet she’s been on for the past 4 months, flying into this long rant about how it teaches you all about the horrible stuff we put in our bodies, flushes toxins and best of all just burns away the fat. It comes with herbal detox pills and these vitamins that are better then anything you’ll find at the drug store. She also mentions how she’s teaching it to her own daughter. “Ali is doing it with me. She just LOVES it!” she says before suggesting I give it a try with my daughter.

I think about her little girl with the long curly hair and big brown eyes. She’s an absolute darling, and I’ve never even considered her as chubby, let alone anywhere near fat. “But… Ali’s fine.  She doesn’t need to diet…” My confusion only seems to upset the other woman. As if she’s heard this story from someone else. “And I want Ali to stay that way!” she responds in a huff. “If she learns now she’ll never end up being the fat girl at school.”

I’m worried now for my daughter. I’m worried that by the good natured but misguided attempts of another woman that my little girl has inadvertently been steered down the path of anorexia. Something I hadn’t counted on needing to worry about till she was in her teen-aged years. Now I have to figure some way to get her off that path. I’m afraid it’s not going to be easy.

Almost all women are guilty of dieting at some point in our lives. Whether it’s trying to loose a few pounds to fit into the perfect dress or wanting to loose the baby fat our last little one gave us. Even I’m guilty of dieting, though I’ve never tried to make a big deal of it. At least I never thought I did till now. Am I wrong? Could I have helped contribute to this aversion to weight gain my daughter has developed at the tender age of 7?

What kind of message do we send to our young girls when they see their mothers living off of diet shakes, prepackaged meals, and popping pills? At what point will society and the fashion industry stop trying to push women into the impossible mold of a minuscule waistline with large, fake breasts?

Remember mothers. Your daughter is watching you. She looks to you as her first example of what a woman should be. What do you want her to see?