Young Children May
Begin to Develop Eating Disorders by Watching TV
August
2, 2000 Research
has shown that most eating disorders begin in
adolescence, but a University of Michigan researcher has
found that even young grade-school children can develop
eating problems — simply by watching television. "The
most straightforward explanation for this finding is
that television viewing increases children's exposure to
dieting images, ideas and behaviors, which in turn, lead
to changes in their eating-related cognitions and
behaviors," says Kristen Harrison, University of
Michigan assistant professor of communication studies. "Because
research on other media effects, such as violence and
aggression, suggests that young children are more likely
than adolescents or adults to model viewed behaviors, it
is reasonable to expect that young children would model
the lean body ideal they observe on television. It is
also reasonable to expect that television exposure will
be correlated with children's understanding of the thin
body as the socially ideal body, and the fat body as the
socially stigmatized body." In
a new study to appear this fall in the journal Communication
Research, Harrison surveyed about 300 students,
aged 6 to 8 years, at 2 mostly white elementary schools
in the Midwest about the amount of television they
watch, their favorite television characters, and their
beliefs about the ideal body shape and fat stereotyping.
She
also measured the students' disordered eating symptoms
by using the Children's Eating Attitudes Test, an
empirical scale containing more than 2 dozen cognitive
and behavioral self-report items. Sample items include
"I stay away from foods with sugar in them"
and "I think a lot about having fat on my
body." Even
after controlling for the fact that some children with
eating problems specifically seek out body-related
information on television, Harrison found that
television viewing, in general, predicts eating disorder
symptoms for both boys and girls. "The
fact that the correlation remained suggests that even
for children who have little or no interest in fitness
and dieting television content, increased television
exposure is still linked to increased disordered
eating," she says. However,
while children's television viewing may indicate the
development of eating disorders, Harrison did not find
that children necessarily favor thin body-shape
standards. This suggests that children may begin
modeling the dieting and exercising behaviors they see
on television even before they actually begin to
internalize the thin-body ideal. In
fact, the girls in the study who watched the most
television chose a heavier figure as representing the
ideal body size for adult women and a thinner figure as
representing their own. This is opposite the pattern one
might expect, in which television viewing would predict
the overestimation of one's own body size and the choice
of unrealistically thin standards for the ideal size of
females in general, Harrison says. "Girls
who were interpersonally attracted to average-weight
female characters reported the healthiest (or normal)
body-size choices and believed thinness to be relatively
unimportant," she says. "This suggests that
adopting normal-weight role models on television could
be beneficial for girls." In
contrast, those girls attracted to thin female
television characters are more likely to view their own
bodies as heavier, while boys attracted to thin male
characters favor a thinner ideal-body size for males,
the study shows. In
addition, television viewing, in general, predicts an
increased tendency among boys to negatively stereotype a
heavy girl (but not a heavy boy) — a finding that
Harrison says is not surprising since prior research has
shown this. She adds that the media may teach young
children, and boys in particular, to "denigrate
fatness before they learn to idealize thinness." "Children's
interpersonal attraction to television characters
appears to play an important role in the outcomes of
television exposure vis-à-vis fat stereotyping and
body-shape standards, although this role is more
complicated than I had initially predicted,"
Harrison says. For
example, she found that attraction to heavy male
characters is associated with decreased
"fat-boy" stereotyping among both boys and
girls, but attraction to fat female characters is not
linked to less "fat-girl" stereotyping. Further,
Harrison says, girls' attraction to average-weight
female characters decreases their risk of developing
thinness-favoring cognitions and behaviors, but for
boys, attraction to average-weight male characters
predicts increased eating disorder symptoms. "It is clear that we need more research to clarify the relationships between children's interpersonal attraction to characters of varying body types and their eating- and body-related cognitions and behaviors," Harrison says. "Only through increased understanding of how children of varying ages and both sexes may develop damaging body standards through early-life media exposure can we increase our understanding of how interventions, especially media-based interventions, may be adapted to a child audience to minimize their risk of developing eating disorders in adolescence and beyond."
Roberta
Lester-Britton specializes in working with
children and adults with body image issues. |
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