Lyla Wolfenstein

i am wondering if anyone has any interesting ideas or experiences to share for helping a teen girl navigate strong feelings about beauty and body image, in an unschooly way - either from personal experience or with your own teen daughters...

i think i may have posted about this before, but she was still in school, and so still "under the influence" on a daily basis, and i can only find a couple responses in the archives, so maybe there are more ideas out there? we both (she and i) feel fairly certain that her 9-12 year old school experiences really influenced her self image/struggle with this issue. she's almost 14 now and has been out of school for only 5 months.

we already have lots of books, she's savvy about web sites and media messages on both "sides"- she has the intellectual understanding wrt to acceptance and inner beauty, etc., and applies it to *other* girls and women - in fact she started "the modeling project" to communicate to clothing companies that REAL women with real bodies buy their clothes - but internalizing self acceptance and even better, self love, is sooooooo much harder.

i can give more info if that would be helpful.

thanks,

Lyla

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Sandra Dodd

-=-in fact she started "the modeling project" to communicate to
clothing companies that REAL women with real bodies buy their clothes
- but internalizing self acceptance and even better, self love, is
sooooooo much harder. =-

My first thought is that if she has an obsession, it will be hard for
her to see the rest of the world. Obsessions can be wonderfully
useful, but if she's feeling self-conscious physically and there's no
good way to know how her physicality might change just from being away
from the pressure of school, and from growing past the age of 13,
maybe she should do a dozen other things before she even turns in the
direction of anything about the fashion industry.

Sandra

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