Table of Contents

Introduction
Stereotyping Body Image
Excessive Teenage Centered Emotional Reaction regarding Appearance
Common Sense Tips for Parents
Parental Support
Binge Eating
Conclusion
Author Bio
Publisher

Introduction

I wanted to write a book on why more and more children are becoming obsessed with this term body image. Once upon a time, this term was used only by psychologists, and people who were bothered about Freud and Jung and scientific researchers, thinking of the corporeal aspects of a physical body, and what the mind thought about it consciously and subconsciously.

But since the time when it has come into popular usage, thanks to the Internet, even parents, who really do not know anything about child psychology have begun using this term with great impunity. According to them, body is a body, and the image is what your body looks like in the mirror!

And that is what the Internet would have you believe. According to sites out there, the body image is a reflection of what you see of yourself in the mirror. Actually, it is much more deeper than that, it is the mental visualization of the perception of your own body as you think of it, mentally in terms of attractiveness and its aesthetics. Paul Schilder, an Austrian psychologist thought up this term, way back in the 30s in one of his research papers, and since then people have begun obsessing on how they look, and how others "see" them and the first impression thereof.

That is natural, instinctive, and human and has been a part of natural selection for centuries, but as more and more teenagers are getting more obsessed with obtaining the perfect figure dictated according to the popular press, public media, and even social sites, this is definitely not good for their future emotional, spiritual, and even mental health. Physically they are going to ruin their good health by starving themselves because they want to be a zero size person. This drastic state of affairs was the reason why so many Hollywood stars, starved to death or drank themselves to death, because their studio chiefs had it written in the contract that they could not gain a pound of weight, while they were under contract!

This extremism was okay in the 30s and 40s, when it was glamour time in Hollywood, especially during the Great Depression, and human beings were held up as role models, goddesses, and every young girl was told to look like that particular star.