What’s your reaction to this image? Can you relate? Did you and your mother actually participate in this activity together, treating it as a bonding thing, a game, a competition or a means of “self-improvement?”
Mother’s Day. It is devoted to the remembrance and celebration of our mothers, those people who first loved us. And, perhaps, even, in the name of that love, diet and weight measurement were a part of that.
With my mom, I believe it was. She battled with her weight her entire life, certainly as long as I’ve known her. I discuss it in my book. Years later, I see how it wasn’t intentionally done to harm me.
But, nevertheless, that focus on body image, weight and thinness did. It’s not just my experience, not perhaps, not just yours, either. Studies have, indeed, shown its impact: I can relate.
“…The study, published this week in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, found that when a teen-age girl develops an eating disorder ‘the mother-daughter relationship appears to contribute significantly.’
Kathleen M. Pike and Judith Rodin, who wrote the study, say they concluded this after comparing the test results of girls with eating disorders with those of girls who did not.
‘It appears that some of the mother’s own dieting and eating behavior and especially her
