A New Year’s Resolution for our Daughters

Take a look at this:

More than a year ago, I posted a similar video, and many of you commented about your concern as well.

Now, I’ve joined other bloggers in spreading the word about Dove’s effort to combat the onslaught of negative messages girls face every day.

Real Girls, Real Pressure: A National Report on the State of Self-Esteem, commissioned by the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, reveals that there is a self-esteem crisis in this country that pervades every aspect of a girl’s life including her looks, performance in school and relationships with friends and family members.

— Seven in ten girls believe they are not good enough or do not measure up in some way, including their looks, performance in school and relationships with friends and family members
— 62% of all girls feel insecure or not sure of themselves
— 57% of all girls have a mother who criticizes her own looks
— More than half (57%) of all girls say they don’t always tell their parents certain things about them because they don’t want them to think badly of them
— The top wish among all girls is for their parents to communicate better with them which includes more frequent and more open conversations as well as discussions about what is happening in their own lives.

Dove is making a difference in the lives of girls across the country through their Self-Esteem Fund. Through nation-wide workshops on self-esteem, national advertising campaigns, and downloadable tools on their website, they are giving girls, moms and mentors the tools they need to boost the self-esteem of girls.

When I agreed to join the movement and blog about this issue, Dove’s PR people sent me a book called “Life Doesn’t Begin Five Pounds from Now,” by Jessica Weiner.

Here’s an excerpt from the review in Publisher’s Weekly:
This volume reads like a manual, helping young women to decode what Weiner calls “the Language of Fat.” She writes perceptively about how girls and women bond over expressions of self-loathing for their bodies (“I noticed just how hard it was to stay intimate with my girlfriends if I wasn’t body-loathing beside them”) and argues that the simple words “I feel fat!” mask an internal world of insecurity and pain.

The idea that we speak “a language of fat” really resonated with me. How often do we use expressions like that? I know I do it. A lot.

So, to get back to the title of this post, this is my New Year’s resolution, to stop speaking the language of fat. No good can come from this language, and it has negative impacts on everyone who can hear it.

Especially her.

And I want her to always have the confidence to wear rainbow-colored rain boots.

So that, my friends, is my New Year’s Resolution.

What’s yours?