By: Leslie Goldman

Nov 11, 2009

The types of things that should bum a five-year-old girl out:

-Cable going out during Dora the Explorer’s season premier
-The closing down of an American Girl doll store
-Being invited to a tea party and finding out it’s BYOC (Bring Your Own Crumpets)

The types of things that should not even register on a five-year-old girl’s radar:

-Airbrushed models

And yet, a new British study has found that little ladies as young as age five are becoming depressed after seeing airbrushed photos of skinny models and pop stars. Five years old.

I’m not trying to be flippant. It’s just that the headline “Even Preschoolers Depressed By Airbrushing” is so, well, depressing that I had to try to lighten the mood somehow.

In the new study, 44 experts from around the world, doctors, psychologists and academics, confirms a "clear majority of adolescent girls and women” develop problems with "depression, stress, guilt, shame, insecurity and body dissatisfaction" in response to “exposure to thin-ideal images taken directly from fashion magazines.”

Many of us have long recognized the impact such images can have on teenage girls (if not experienced it firsthand--MTV Spring Break practically made me aspire to become a professional compulsive over-exerciser in high school), but the fact that kindergartners are being impacted seriously enough that published studies are being conducted shows us how younger and younger girls are being hurt. In fact, the experts found that “girls ages 5 1/2 to 7 1/2 reported less body esteem and greater desire for a thinner body after exposure to images or thin dolls (Barbie) compared to girls who saw images of dolls with a healthy body size (Emme™) or no dolls."  In a document emailed to me by study co-author Dr. Helga Dittmar of the University of Sussex, entitled “The Impact of Media Images on Body Image and Behaviours: A Summary of the Scientific Evidence,” one study showed that watching appearance-related TV (such as soap operas) predicted a drop in appearance satisfaction one year later in girls ages 5 to 8.

Five- and eight-year-olds should not be fretting about body image any more than we adults should be fretting about cubby holes and tricycles. For a refresher, here’s what a five-year-old SHOULD be concerned about:

1) How much money the Tooth Fairy leave under their pillows
2) Coloring inside the lines
3) Getting 10 to 11 hours of sleep each night
4) Memorizing their address
5) Correctly using the word “because”

Instead, they are catching glimpses of this on the family room TV and it seems these images are burning themselves into their impressionable young minds. Are they consciously thinking, “I need to lose weight in order to have a perfectly straight up-and-down body with augmented breasts in order to be loved and found attractive and therefore successful and desirable”? Of course not. Most girls this age are just starting to use more than six words in a sentence. But the thought process IS occurring on a subconscious level--so much so that they, like us, their older sisters and moms, feel sad after seeing pictures of “perfect”-looking models.

We are making some strides. Case in point: Partly in response to the study, Michelle Mone, founder of British lingerie company Ultimo, recently stated she will no longer use airbrushing in promoting her brand. The impetus? Her ten-year-old daughter, Bethany, was starting to talk about dieting.

"My wee girl said, 'Mummy, I'm going to go on a diet.' I told her, 'For goodness sake, stop all that nonsense.'  We got a phone call from her teacher because she has been saying it a lot at school too. They were really concerned about her. The school asked us to go and speak about it. I went and it was quite emotional. It's made me not have as many magazines out--a ten-year-old worrying about her figure is unbelievable.”

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