Stop Teaching Kids to Hate Themselves
By: Melina List
Tags: Body Image, Education, Childhood, Culture, Self Improvement

New Year’s is the worst time to be fat.

January is the month of self-improvement, of addressing flaws and making goals to better oneself.

Naturally, because fatness is widely considered to be abhorrent, January is also the month of weight-loss plans, backed up by a seasonal marketing push by diet and fitness companies.

My first New Year’s resolution to lose weight was for the year 2008.

Our teacher made the whole class come up with a resolution before school went on break — why precisely a bunch of children needed to set these kinds of goals for themselves I’m not sure — and fill out sheets with a drawing and caption.

Being a multi-media kid, I used the frayed Crayola markers to draw myself and a stubby orange crayon for the carrots my 2d self was eating.

2nd grade and I already thought there needed to be less of me in the world.

Perhaps things would be different if my resolution was to eat more vegetables or play more sports, goals tied into health (which, for the record, is also not a measure of value or respectability). These still would’ve been weird choices for a young child’s goal for the year, but at least they aren’t based on something about me being wrong.

But no, as a little seven-year-old, I decided I took up too much space.

For me, it wasn’t about health, beauty, or fitting in. It was about being worthy.

I just wanted to be worthy of respect and other people’s attention.

Because maybe, just maybe, if I could force myself to be smaller, people would like me more.

According to those around me, I was right to think that way.

My classmates and teacher all validated my self-hatred by encouraging weight loss.

I’m not mad at the numerous kids who congratulated me on my idea; they were just children who didn’t realize how they were hurting me.

Kids hurt other kids in this way because they are taught to, and no child should be expected to be critical of messages they are constantly bombarded with at school, from their parents, and through media. The hurt they cause is still so real, but it’s not their responsibility to correct the ideas of what should be trustworthy sources.

Adults, on the other hand, need to do better because they are far more capable of recognizing and discerning problematic messaging.

My teacher didn’t just glance at my resolution, oh no. Neither did she approve it and then shove it in a file or send it home. No, she was so confident that a seven-year-old wanting to lose weight was a good, healthy message, that she hung it up in the hallway with the rest of the class’s work.

Do I retrospectively wish that she demanded I come up with another resolution or later taken me aside to talk about why, out of all of the ideas in the world, all I wanted was to make myself smaller?

Well, yeah, kinda.

More than that, I wish she had explained to me that I didn’t have to think about weight loss, and without any qualifications about how I was still relatively healthy or I wasn’t that big for my age. There was no reason for me to be worried about how big I looked because there is nothing unworthy of respect about being big.

But even if she had, I don’t know if she would’ve been successful in changing my views of fatness because all of my important relationships at that point reinforced what I already knew: if I wanted to be valued, I needed to be as small as possible.

I put these relationships into two major categories: those with authority, like teachers, parents, media, and peers, being classmates. I do so because both types of relationships are fundamentally different, and for me, it takes an understanding of how they are different to confront how to stop kids in the future from thinking they need to be small to be worthy.

The trust that comes from a relationship with authority is inherently different than the trust that comes from a relationship with peers.

Authority is supposed to be reliable, something you can believe has only your best interests at heart. Authority is supposed to be safe. Oftentimes it is not reliable or safe, but in the system we live in, these are the ideals we are taught as children.

Still, it is by necessity, not friendly. Hopefully, it is kind, but friendliness and the ease of comfortability can mess with power structures, and authority can’t exist without power. And that’s all under the best of circumstances: authority is carried out by individual humans who are by nature imperfect, so it is very easy for trust within it to be broken or at least warped.

We trust in authority because we are forced to, not necessarily because we find them trustworthy.

The role of a peer comes with a mutual understanding of the other and their experiences, not identical but complementary. Often it comes with a mutual skepticism or critical view of authority. There is a camaraderie, in best cases, a community, theoretically operating in the best interest of the individuals and the group as much as possible under authority.

Trust in a peer, in large part, comes from a belief in each other, that they have taken the best lessons from authority and brushed aside the worst. This gets more applicable as we get older: we trust each other’s judgment as it tends to not come from being controlled, but from being in the same boat.

Being taught to hate oneself by authority and peers are different, but connected.

Direct disapproval from authority leaves a mark, absolutely, but we know from a young age that authority can be unjustly cruel; from an evil politician in some superhero movie to a mean gym teacher, kids see that power isn’t always a sign of value. Kids are forced to respect and to learn from authority, but they know that authority doesn’t always respect them.

The problem is that kids aren’t always able to differentiate when authority is doing them a disservice.

Sure, adults sometimes don’t either, but through intense awareness and thorough education, especially of oft unspoken concepts like systems of oppression or the faults of our society, they can gain the skills to recognize a bad authority, skills that are inaccessible to children.

When you’re a kid, you should be able to trust authority, and you should be able to trust your peers.

When your peers do you wrong, authority can hold them accountable.

When authority does you wrong, authority has to hold themselves accountable.

This is damn hard to do when, as a child, your authority taught you the same problematic theory that you, now an authority, are now teaching.

So do I blame my 2nd-grade teacher for teaching me to hate myself when she was probably taught the same things when she was a child?

YES

Because she was the only person in that situation who could’ve taken a hard look at her beliefs and decided to change hers and then mine.

It might be too much to ask of an underpaid public school teacher already with far too many things on her plate, and as I admitted earlier I don’t know how well it would’ve worked with the rest of the world in disagreement.

But for a child, any person, really, feeling worthy of respect more than justifies the work needed to make them believe in their value.