What did this gender-studies ace, feminist, girl-power Mom do when her 7-year-old daughter said, “I’m fat”?

1.  Her heart broke, and she went all “mush” — at a complete loss for what to say or do.

2.  She kept her cool and said the party line, “You are built just perfect – strong and healthy.”

3.  She got really serious, shooed her other kids away, shut the door, and had a face-to-face talk with her daughter about all of the amazing things her body and mind can do besides look “thin” to other 7-year-old girls who had called her “kind of fat.”

4.  She felt desperate, telling her daughter that everyone thinks she’s “beautiful” — and that she and her friends must therefore be wrong about her looks.

5.  She felt angry and judgmental about the other girls and their mothers — what kind of messages were they sending out into the world?  How could they wound her daughter’s self-esteem like this?

6.  She stripped off her clothes (her daughter was already naked) and did a crazy, happy dance in the mirror, shaking everything she had and improvising a song along the lines of “we are perfect just the way we are.”

7.  All of the above.

Read this wonderful blog post by mom Janell Hofmann to find out the answer!

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Photo courtesy of lori.e.burleson