Key Points
A comment from a friend made me realize adults shouldn't comment on children's bodies fat or thin. This is an adapted excerpt from"Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture" by Virginia Sole-Smith...
When adults see children, we have a seemingly uncontrollable urge to comment on how they've grown and changed; to mark the passage of time, yes, but also to scrutinize their bodies for clues about the people they are becoming or might someday be...
We started talking about vacation plans and nobody said anything further about my kids' bodies or their own..
More recent research suggests that kids as young as three years old already associate fat bodies including fat legs with negative traits..
But our culture, dominated as it is by whiteness and patriarchy, slices bodies especially girl bodies apart into a series of discrete, idealized shapes all smooth, taut, hairless, and, most of all, thin..
