Body image scientist and researcher Charlotte Markey, PhD joins us to discuss the many factors that impact body image and how parents can help their kids develop a positive sense of self.
Christy and Charlotte both share examples from their own parenting, including how to handle tricky conversations about body size, gender, and more. They also unpack the difference between body positivity and body neutrality—and why the popular definitions of those terms are different from their use in research.
Behind the paywall, Charlotte explains how she thinks about makeup for girls, adaptive vs maladaptive grooming routines, ways to tell if a kid is struggling with body dysmorphia, and a six-step process for helping young people develop media literacy.
The first half of this episode is available to everyone. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
Charlotte Markey, Ph.D., is a body image scientist and researcher, having studied all things body image and eating behaviors for nearly 30 years! She is passionate about understanding what makes us feel good about our bodies and helping people to develop a healthy body image and relationship with food. Charlotte is a psychology professor at Rutgers University and has published over 100 scholarly articles and chapters about health issues.
Dr. Markey also an author, having most recently published The Body Image Book series (The Body Image Book for Girls in 2020; The Body Image Book for Boys in 2022, Adultish: The Body Image Book for Life in 2024, The 2nd edition of The Body Image Book for Girls will publish in 2026, The Body Image Book for Women will be published in 2027). She also recently co-edited the 3-volume Encyclopedia of Mental Health (2023). She writes regularly for news outlets such as Psychology Today and is often interviewed for TV, news articles, and podcasts.
To learn more about Charlotte Markey, you can visit her website at CharlotteMarkey.com and TheBodyImageBook.com
Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Body Image: What the Evidence Really Says, with Charlotte Markey
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Your book is the Body Image Book for Girls and I’m pregnant as we record this, like very pregnant, actually, and my second baby is also going to be a girl. So I feel a really great weight of responsibility to help my now two daughters develop a positive body image. And of course, that’s important in boys too, and kids of all genders. But I think girls are particularly vulnerable for reasons that I know we all discuss. Can you talk about why you wanted to write a book about girls body image?
Charlotte Markey: Yeah. It’s interesting because when I was working on the first edition of The Body Image Book for Girls, I started that around 2017 or 18, I think. And when I was reaching out to people to try to get it published, people were like, well, nonfiction for tweens and teens is just not really a hot market. So there wasn’t a lot of initial enthusiasm until I found the right people. And then I think other parents and moms in particular just seemed to really get it and had sort of the same sentiments that you’ve already shared, which is that as mothers in particular, we feel a great deal of responsibility to help our kids, and maybe especially our daughters, grow up feeling good about themselves and having a positive body image. And as someone who studied these issues my whole adult life, I just realized there weren’t really accessible resources for kids.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, there’s not a lot that’s written specifically for kids. Even in your book, you give little resource boxes at the end of each chapter. And I’ve noticed there’s a few that are like, well, this one’s for parents, but you can still get some good information from it. This one’s written more for grownups, but there’s not a lot for kids specifically.
Charlotte Markey: It’s gotten a lot better in the last five or six or eight years since I started working on these. But the reference I was really using was puberty books and there were far fewer good ones even then than there are now, I think. But when I was reading puberty books with my own daughter, who was about 11 when I started the first edition, I really noticed that there was a lot of focus on, physical growth, as there should be. It’s a puberty book. And then kind of superficial mention of eating healthy and self esteem, and it just didn’t really do body image any justice at all.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. Was it like “healthy eating” advice that didn’t really get into intuitive eating or disordered eating prevention or that kind of thing?
Charlotte Markey: Yeah, I mean, I’m sure you’ll see as your daughters get a little bit older but I started with a variety of the puberty books pretty early because I’m just hypersensitive about all of this, given what I do for a living. And there’s like a little bubble or something about eating. Like, make sure you eat your fruits and vegetables, which, it’s fine. I’m not particularly offended by that, but it doesn’t include any of the sort of nuance, I guess I really wanted even kids to have when it came to how they think about food.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. It sort of also creates this good and bad food dynamic to say, just like, eat your fruits and vegetables without mentioning other food groups or the sort of need for balance and the need for completeness and having enough food.
Charlotte Markey: Yeah. And anything that focuses on just healthy eating for kids or it’s important to feel good about yourself in kind of these very broad strokes, I think misses a lot of the messiness of body image and eating. And it’s not that I expect 12 year olds to get all of that, but I also think we need to give them more information and not talk down to them. That’s something that I really focus on a lot with my own kids. And when I do, any kind of education, kids will get a lot more than we give them credit for by the time they’re tweens. And I think it’s really important to try to give them some of the nuance and not just say like, yeah, don’t eat that, do eat that. They get that that’s an oversimplified view of the world.
Christy Harrison: I’ve been thinking a lot about my older daughter and how to support her body image now that she’s getting big enough to really take in body messages from the culture. Speaking of it starting early, right? She listened to the song We Don’t Talk About Bruno from Encanto, and she asked me what a gut was. And I knew that was coming because I had heard it in the song. It’s like, “He told me I grow a gut. And just like he said,” implying that it’s a bad thing that this guy is growing a gut. And it’s sort of a little throwaway line in the middle of it. But I was like, oh, how am I going to have this conversation? She’s too little to get into a real discussion about diet culture. She will have recently turned four by the time people hear this.
And I said something about like, well, some people think gut is like a big belly and some people think it’s bad to have a big belly, but actually, in our house, we think it’s fine to have any sort of belly and any sort of body, and all bodies are good, and we come in all different shapes and sizes. And she was just kind of like, okay, anyway, moving on. Didn’t really seem to faze her. But I’m curious if you have any advice for this in between age. I know The Body Image Book for Girls is more for tweens and teens, but if there’s anything we can do as parents of younger children to lay the groundwork for positive body image.
Charlotte Markey: I mean, I think exactly what you said is what we want to be saying, and we want to be saying it over and over again in slightly different ways. We’ll get so many opportunities to just insert a sentence or two. And, I mean, even young kids are going to tune out a lecture. So it’s not about having this well prepared, thought out speech about any of this. It’s much more about just reiterating our values across time and then also offering opportunities for kids to ask questions like you did.
Christy Harrison: Well, that’s good to know. Thank you for reassuring me on that. Peppering in those values conversations has been helpful, too. Just to be like, well, some people think this but in our house, we think that she’s already also getting messages from friends at school that their parents are restricting sugar and things like that. And people are snooping in each other’s lunchboxes now.
And one kid said, oh, don’t eat your granola bar. That’s not healthy. You have to eat this food first, you have to eat the dessert last and stuff. And she’s come to me with those questions, too. God, it starts so early. Like the granola bar comment. She was in the twos class when that happened. It’s wild.
Charlotte Markey: Yeah and I mean, I think, too, it’s important as parents to appreciate we’re not gonna always get it right. They’re gonna ask a question and it’s bedtime, and we’re like, oh, come on, we can’t do this now. We’re exhausted. Or you have another kid in the car for some reason, and you maybe don’t want to get into it with another kid. It’s not one conversation. It’s lots of little conversations. And we can do these conversations over as needed, too.
And I think that teaches our kids a lot of valuable lessons to sometimes just say, like, you brought this up last night and I wasn’t really thinking about maybe what your question meant and I’ve been thinking about it since then. And since then I’ve been thinking, I really wanted to share with you something that’s important to me and that’s that you understand that we’re accepting of all people, no matter what they look like or however you want to say it.
But I think we sometimes put too much pressure on ourselves that if we say it wrong once, that’s it, if we don’t have the perfect answer one day, that we’ve done all this damage. And fortunately, kids are pretty resilient.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I have also had those repeat follow up conversations where I’m like, I said this, but I wasn’t really thinking. We had some friends of hers over who were boys and we had a playdate and they were very wild. And she’s like, why were they being so wild? And I was like, sometimes boys are just wild at this age. And I wasn’t thinking the implications of that. And then I thought about it and I was like, oh, that is not what I want to be teaching her or I don’t want to be putting these sort of gender distinctions in her head.
And I was like, that was sort of silly of me. I was saying something based on a stereotype and tried to explain what a stereotype was and it was like, that wasn’t really what I meant. Some kids are just more wild than others. And I can think of some girls who can be pretty wild too. And she was like, who? And I said, well, you for one can be pretty wild and named sometimes and your other friends and I was just trying to correct my mistake. But she was sort of like, oh, yeah, okay. And it seemed to resonate and then has never been brought up again.
So hopefully that was a decent correction. But I feel like anytime those things happen, I become a lot more comfortable just being like, oh, I can correct the record here. I don’t have to just stick to my guns forever on something.
Charlotte Markey: And I do think it’s really interesting just how receptive young kids can be to that kind of information from a parental figure in particular. I can also think of examples where I just said something really matter of factly to one of my kids, like, oh, no, that person doesn’t have a wife. That person has a husband, or, whatever and they were just like, oh, all right, it’s like this raging political debate outside of our home. But at the time, they’re like, oh, all right. That totally makes sense. And, of course, the world is going to increasingly affect their perceptions of these issues that are so important to us. All we can really do is hope that we’ve, I think, laid the groundwork, keep providing the kind of information that we think is valuable and make sure that we’ve created a safe space so they can ask questions.
We can’t shield them from the outside world as much as we’d love to wrap them in bubble wrap and just leave it at that. But unfortunately, we can’t totally keep the granola bar comment from happening or even some cartoon from being fatphobic.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. So the best we can do is have conversations about it after the fact and point out things that are a little different in the outside world than they are in our home, maybe, or that different people have different values.
Charlotte Markey: And those are good learning opportunities. So in some ways, it’s good just to have the segue to talk about some of the issues, too, because otherwise, it’s all too easy just to forget to say certain things really explicitly. I think we take for granted as parents that we don’t have to lay it all out.
Christy Harrison: We think that it’s gonna be sort of absorbed by osmosis, I guess, too. If we have friends of different sizes and shapes and skin colors and all of that, or we expose them to diverse media and have books about different things that they’ll pick it up, but sometimes that’s not really enough.
Charlotte Markey: Yeah. And I think all of that is important also. I wouldn’t write books for kids if I didn’t think they had the potential to be useful. But I do think that sometimes it’s good for parents just to be pretty explicit and direct about things that we really value, whether it comes to just how we treat other people or how we take care of our own bodies and our health starts off really kind of more general, and as kids get older, the conversations can shift to include more nuance and more detail and be more complicated, as these issues are.
Christy Harrison: One other thing I’m thinking of when I’m thinking about having conversations that are challenging for kids and redoing conversations as needed is one of the things that comes up so much in the research, and I’m sure you know this better than anyone, is the evidence on parents not talking about their own weight or disparaging their own looks or talking about how they need to lose weight or something like that in front of their kids. That is really protective if we can manage not to have those conversations in front of kids.
And for a lot of parents, that has happened already or that is something that’s happening sometimes, and they’re trying, they’re making an effort, but these things slip out. Or even, I’ve been thinking about my own experience, I had so long to heal from my own disordered eating and internalized weight stigma and have gotten really far in my recovery and my healing from those things. And my body has changed a lot in both fertility treatments leading up to pregnancy and then pregnancy.
And, there’s certain things that I’m still grappling with sort of some internalized weight stigma and some ableism as well. Like, internalized ableism, where I’m like, oh, I can’t do that right now, or I can’t do that anymore. And it’s frustrating to me sometimes that I’m not able to play with her as agilely on the floor as I used to be or sit in her little chairs at her art table because she loves to make art with me. And I try to be neutral about that stuff when I talk to her about it. But I wonder if sometimes, like, a tone comes out that I’m frustrated with this or whatever or that, if she feels frustrated with these limitations that I have, too.
And so I’m just curious, with that piece of it, whether it’s the sort of really subtle stuff like I’m talking about, or more explicit stuff, like, parents have had conversations about their own weight or denigrated, talked negatively about their size or their shape or how they look in front of their kids, how to kind of correct the record on that and have productive conversations about that.
Charlotte Markey: Yeah, I mean, I think there are some really sort of direct and explicit things parents do that can be harmful, like disparage their own bodies. And then there are some much more subtle things. And when I say subtle, I may even mean, like, being sort of generally disparaging or commenting just on, like a celebrity’s weight or something.
So I think what’s important, again, is if you feel like your conversation is not in line with your values and what you’re hoping to teach your kids to then revisit it. I think something like, you can’t sit in the chair right now. Your kid probably doesn’t even really care or won’t ever remember some of it. We worry about more as parents probably and kids may not be picking up on it.
But the first study I ever published over 25 years ago now, we looked at 5-year-old girls and whether or not they were experiencing any dissatisfaction with their bodies. And that was sort of the youngest age group anyone had looked at at that point. And we found that 20% of girls were reporting some body dissatisfaction at 5 years of age and it was linked with mother’s body dissatisfaction. So I don’t know that 5 year olds experience body dissatisfaction the way an adolescent or an adult does. I think what they’re likely to experience is just sort of the internalization of some of the language and expectations that they’re getting from parents. So in this case, mothers.
So if mothers are being disparaging and essentially teaching their daughters that this is just normative, we don’t like our bodies, that that’s kind of what young girls I think are most apt to probably be clinging onto. And then that manifests as its own sort of body dissatisfaction that can only deepen once societal influences become more at play.
Christy Harrison: Is there evidence on sort of the flip side of this that parents speaking positively about their own bodies has any effect on kids body image?
Charlotte Markey: Yeah, I was just looking at a study the other day that, I don’t know if I talk about it in the girl’s book or one of my other books, but yeah, there is some research on this and there’s also some interesting research that when kids become older, so older than your daughter but when kids are actually positive about their bodies, that can have a positive impact on parents.
So we always think of it only going from the parents being the influencers here. But I thought it was really interesting in this one particular study that some younger people think about these issues differently and they’ve had some of the body positivity movement during their lifetime and they’re a little more careful in terms of some of what they say and they’re more thoughtful about some of these issues. They don’t take it all for granted. So sometimes adults can benefit.
Christy Harrison: I’m wondering if there’s any specific positive things that came out of the research that parents can say or ways of modeling a positive relationship with their body, even if they don’t totally feel it because parents may not always feel amazing about their bodies. Even I, having done this work for so many years, I took the little quiz in your book to kind of look at where does your body image fall on this scale? And it was just sort of average, it wasn’t super positive.
So I spend a lot of time in body neutrality, probably where I’m not really thinking about my body or when I am thinking about it, I’m trying to take care of it and be compassionate with it, but not necessarily celebrating it. I’m curious if there’s any sort of specific phrases or ways of relating to one’s body that were beneficial for kids to see.
Charlotte Markey: There’s often a misperception in terms of what at least researchers think of when we think of body positivity and it actually does look more like what in popular spaces is referred to as body neutrality. So this idea of respecting your body, caring for your body, trying to be appreciative of it, treating it as something that has functions that are important, not just a look or an appearance.
So feeling some joy in your body is great and that sort of tips you closer to maybe body positivity as it’s popularly conceptualized. But I think it’s unrealistic to expect that we all feel fabulous and joyful in our bodies all the time. But in terms of trying to help kids, I think, nurture their own appreciation of their body, I think focusing on its functionality can be really important and is also really in tune with, especially among younger kids, just how active they often are.
So when kids are running around or being wild or learning a new activity, I think those are really important times to say, look at how cool it is, what your body was able to do there. Or your running really fast, or can you feel your heart now that you’ve been doing that, see how your heart is helping you and help young kids to grow up thinking more about all these functions because I think young people all too often just think that they’re kind of invincible, right? Like their bodies are just gonna work no matter what they do. And of course that’s not entirely true. They’re resilient, but they still need to be cared for. And also, I’m not a biologist, I’m a psychologist, but if you look at any age appropriate biology books in terms of human anatomy, it’s pretty fascinating and amazing what our bodies are able to do. And I think orienting kids towards that can serve them really well.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that’s great. That’s really helpful to know. And I thinking about the functionality of my body was very helpful to me and healing my relationship with it and overcome in the later processes of healing from disordered eating and connecting it. I mean, I think it gets tricky with kids connecting food to functionality. I think that gets, especially for young kids, too far ahead of where they are developmentally able to think about food. And maybe appreciation of food and sort of knowing where food comes from is about the extent of it when they’re really young.
But when they get older, teenagers certainly can start to learn also about how food helps fuel them and help them grow and help them do all the things they want to do in a positive way and not have to denigrating certain foods because they’re not “growing foods” or something like that, but starting to think about just how food in general gives us energy.
Charlotte Markey: Yeah. And that’s part of why also I include the puberty chapter in The Body Image Book for Girls and The Body Image Book for Boys because I do think it’s just actually fascinating how much changes internally during puberty. I love telling kids, like, your heart’s gonna double in size. That’s kind of wild when you think about it. Your whole frontal part of your brain is not actually developed yet and that needs to be happening during these adolescent and early adult years. And so taking care of your body means allowing those things to happen and those body parts, those organs, that you need for the rest of your life. So it’s a sort of developmentally fragile period for young people during puberty, and yet it sets the stage in some ways for adulthood.
Christy Harrison: Well, and there’s so much growth that needs to happen, including weight gain is the point you make. And I think that can be very destabilizing and sometimes downright scary for people in this culture, for kids in this culture, when they’ve been told their body should stay small or they’ve been used to looking a certain way, getting praised for having a childlike body, and then growing into a more adult body and sometimes gaining a lot of weight, sometimes gaining above the average amount and maybe moving into an adult body that is larger.
Charlotte Markey: Sometimes, then they go and see their doctor and, lo and behold, the height weight chart can become a real source of stress. I can’t tell you how many young people I’ve talked with across my career who say that probably a well intentioned physician told them, like, you’re gaining too much weight or you are too big and they hadn’t finished growing. So there was just no reason to be concerned and no reason to recommend weight loss because we don’t want young people losing weight. They are developing in so many ways that they need to be gaining weight still. And it’s just really unfortunate that sometimes people are so concerned about appearance that they forget about some of these functionality issues.
Christy Harrison: And even doctors, even pediatricians who ought to know better and I think some of that comes from pressure from diet culture and the medicalized diet industry, including these GLP-1 manufacturers and the pressure now to prescribe these drugs to kids and kids who are seen as being too high on the growth curves or whatever. It’s just so upsetting to see that because it really can interfere with a kid’s growth and ability to come into their adult body and have their body function the way they need to. It can have a lot of negative impacts to try to intervene and make a kid lose weight at this vulnerable time, like you said.
Charlotte Markey: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we want kids to be developing hopefully a really healthy relationship with food in their body, able to enjoy food. It becomes increasingly a part of their social life, or at least it should really during the adolescent years. And we want them to be nourishing their body so that all that really cool development can take place. And I really wish in doctor’s visits or school education we focused a lot more on that.
Like, look at these co developmental things that are happening and in order to ensure that they do happen, there’s not actually that much you have to do. You have to eat and rest and ideally be active a little bit if it’s possible. You have to sleep and you have to eat. And the fact that then we even try to minimize some of those related, just sort of basic ways that our bodies need care is really unfortunate.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. And it is so much simpler than I think a lot of people make it out to be. The body can be trusted, kids’ bodies can be trusted to grow as they need to be. And obviously there are certain medical conditions that would need some additional assistance. And I’ve talked about that a little bit here too. Like my daughter even has a low blood sugar condition that we need to sort of intervene with a little bit more than with a kid who didn’t have something like that. But in general, even with a condition like that, we can find ways to trust kids bodies to grow appropriately.
Charlotte Markey: Yeah, parents are more often than not well intentioned. They want to provide nourishment to their children. And yet a lot of times it’s kind of counterproductive in terms of what we’d really like them to be doing, which is just kind of not having their kids worry about food. I mean, hopefully having enough of it to eat, hopefully developing preferences and learning what they like and learning a little bit maybe about even food preparation, but just not thinking about it a whole lot.
We don’t want them to start using up a ton of mental space in terms of what food is healthy or I do some clinical work too, and I’m sure you’re aware it’s like every kid that I see, it’s like, well, no, I want the protein granola. Protein is just on such a streak right now. And I was like, you don’t need the protein granola. I’m not going to try to step in here for your nutritionist. That’s not my role. But let me tell you most people are getting plenty of protein. Don’t think about it. We really want to protect kids from using up energy and mental space on some of these issues.
That’s one thing that is really in some ways nothing short of tragic if you just think, especially among girls and women, how much energy and brain power is delegated to bodies, appearance, food, and like, what could they be doing instead? You know, what could all of us be doing instead? I feel like we really would take over the world.
Christy Harrison: I know, completely. I mean, this reminds me of something that you write about that I wanted to unpack a little bit, which is the concept of adaptive appearance investment. And this idea that some amount of investment in your appearance or taking care of your appearance is “normal” or positive or can fit in with a positive body image and relationship with food, but then it can tip over as well into this maladaptive appearance investment. And I’m just curious, sort of what that line is for you and what adaptive appearance investment really means.
Sometime I think about, if I just had my husband’s getting ready routine as opposed to mine, right? I mean, in mine I would think of as probably adaptive appearance investment for a woman, like sort of often relative to gender in this day and age, I guess, but like, I do extra steps of skincare and things like that that he doesn’t do. And I’m like, if I could shave off that much time from my routine, how much time would I end up having for other things? What would that add up to over the course of my lifetime? And if we could really get it down to like near zero, that would be amazing. And that’s not always practical in the culture we live in.
Some of my skincare stuff is like I have eczema and I have to do extra moisturizing stuff that he doesn’t do or whatever. Some of it is relative based on the person and their needs and their body’s needs and stuff like that. But I’m just curious to unpack that concept of adaptive appearance investment a little bit.
Charlotte Markey: Yeah, I love dichotomizing adaptive and maladaptive appearance investments. But of course, like everything in the real world, it’s probably this continuum and there’s this very gray area somewhere in the middle. And it’s probably somewhat individual, right? Because like you said, you have sort of some grooming routines that are adaptive for you but in contrast, if your 4-year-old who doesn’t have eczema wanted a whole bunch of skin care products, then maybe we would call that maladaptive.
And I’m sure you’re aware of this recent skin care craze among young kids. And there are these skincare lines now marketed to three and up. One of which I was just reading about this this week actually,
