Body image and self confidence: A learned social construct

In this article about body image and self-confidence, the writer talks about how certain comments, habits and other’s insecurities during childhood can generate lifelong body insecurities. She debates, being based on social studies, how parents, from extremely young ages, influence their children’s opinion about their bodies and about body complexion in general. Furthermore, she argues that parent’s influence on children is due to parent’s insecurities.

Therefore, this demonstrates that bias towards larger or non-accepted bodies are learned, and constitute a social construct based, nowadays, on social media, TV, advertising, etc. In consequence, nowadays it is really difficult to be free from prejudices.

On the other hand, it’s important to also consider the existing movement against body bias that promotes body-love and self-care. This movement, also, is currently prompted by social media. So, there’s a duality in social media because it promotes body bias while it also support body-love.

In conclusion, due to parent’s insecurities based influence on their children, people are, from young ages, under body bias and prejudices, which affects their individual self-love and their social behavior. Moreover, nowadays, this phenomenon is much bigger because of social media, even though social media also involves a revolutionary body-love movement.