Why Every Day is Father's Day - Especially for a Daughter's Body Image

“Dads are huge, and they don’t get enough credit…the number one way to boost a girl’s self esteem is to receive physical affection from her dad.”

by Abby Ellin

When she was four years old, Helena Goei, now nine, began asking her father questions about weight. Not about the numbers on the scale or how many calories were in a Twinkie, but things like,  "Do you think my stomach is fat?" and "Why is my sister's stomach skinny?" For her Dad, Ryan Goei, 36, a professor at the University of Minnesota, his daughter’s questions sounded an alarm bell:  “I became acutely aware of how much all of us talk and make jokes about weight.”  Goei actively intervened to nurture a healthy body image in his daughter and doesn’t hesitate to coach family and friends either.  “As Helena's father I feel it is my job to stand up and help create an environment that allows her to transcend her body a bit, no matter how it fits or breaks the normative expectations.”

Goei’s instincts are right on. Although popular culture doesn’t actively promote the idea, fathers have an enormous influence on their daughters’ self-esteem, especially when it comes to body image. It makes sense, when you think about it---most fathers, after all, are the first man in a girl’s life. The way he interacts with her—and she with him—usually shapes her future relationships with men, for better or for worse.  Remember the ice-cream scene in the movie Little Miss Sunshine?  When her Dad suggests that Olive might not want to eat chocolate ice-cream for breakfast since it can make her “fat” and ruin her chances at the beauty contest, the whole family needs to come to her rescue before she takes a bite.

“Dads set the standard for what ‘man’ is and what ‘man’ values,” says Joe Kelly, the author of  Dads and Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand, and Support Your Daughter and the founder of thedadman.com. “So if a dad is conscious of the dynamic of the messages in the culture, he can use his leverage to counter this message and be a positive force in his daughter’s life.” Not, he stresses, that a father has more influence than a mother, but that a father has a “unique position of leverage that no one else has, because he’s a man.”

Meg Meeker, a pediatrician in Traverse City, Michigan and author of  Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters agrees. “Dads are huge, and they don’t get enough credit,” she says. “We know that the number one way to boost a girl’s self esteem is to receive physical affection from her dad.”  This is especially important for overweight girls, who “often have a sense that they’re untouchable,” she says. “We don’t touch and hug overweight girls like we do skinny girls. And when girls get touched and hugged, there’s a sense that they're seen, accepted, and liked -- that who they are is OK. And when a girl receives that gift from her dad, it has triple the power.”

That’s exactly what Kelly tried to do with his twin daughters, Nia and Mavis, who are now 30. He and his wife, Nancy Gruver, are the co-founders of New Moon, a magazine and web community for pre-teen and teen girls. When his daughters were growing up, he and his wife made it a point to focus on who they were as people, rather than on their appearance. “To my mind, they were incredibly beautiful, but what was important was that they were clever and liked to run around and do things,” says Kelly, who frequently lectures on fatherhood and also works at The Emily Program, an eating disorder facility in the Twin Cities.

Mavis, a grants manger at a women’s foundation in San Francisco, recalls how both of her parents handled her appearance concerns. While weight was never an issue, height was -- she’s only five feet tall, and it annoyed her when people would comment on her stature (or lack thereof).  “If I was venting, my parents would say, ‘Yeah, that’s frustrating, but it’s not the most important thing, here’s the thing to focus on,” she says.    “If we were getting dressed up and feeling happy and excited they would say ‘you look great,’ but it was always about the emotion or our accomplishments rather than the visual. Insides were more important than outsides.” That said, she knows how achingly difficult it is not to internalize the cultural messages about ideal bodies, even if you do have the most progressive parents on the planet. But “if you can step back from that, then you can be kinder to yourself,” she says.

Allrighty then. But how exactly is that done? According to Lucy Bloom, the director of Kansas City's Father-Daughter Summit for the National Center for Fathering, a one-day workshop for fathers and teen/young adult daughters, the best thing a dad can do is, well, the best thing a mom can do: Plan family activities that involve physical activity. Grocery shop together and teach her to make healthy food choices in an encouraging way. Offer healthy foods at home. When you eat out, avoid the greasy fast food restaurants and head for the fresh food options.

And, of course, model healthy diet and exercise without pressuring your offspring. “Many girls tell us that their fathers make comments about their exercise, about eating enough, or eating too much,” she says. “The unfortunate result is that daughters interpret the comments to mean that their father's approval depends on their weight and their exercise. She feels that she has to earn his love by how she looks on the outside. Many of these daughters have voiced deep disappointment and even hatred towards their fathers for judging them by how they look, rather than who they are.”

And yet—beware.  Michael Gurian, a family therapist in Spokane, WA and author of The Wonder of Girls, thinks it’s irresponsible for fathers NOT to acknowledge their daughters’ weight problem. “I know how bad it is to be obese and how dangerous it is to be overweight,” says Gurian, the father of two girls ages, 17 and 20. “You lose more self-esteem as a growing child if you end up 50 pounds overweight. As a therapist, I’m kind of ipso facto involved in a therapy movement that has convinced people that in some ways girls are very fragile, and that if you address the fact that they’re thirty or forty pounds overweight and they’re 13 it will somehow destroy their self esteem.  I don’t agree with that. We have to be as positive as possible, as much as possible, but we must tell the truth.”

Gurian has both clinical and personal experience on the topic of teens, Dads, and weight -- one of his daughters is reed thin, while the other tends to gain weight and compare herself to her slimmer sibling. “I say, ‘You’re not fat, you’re forty pounds overweight.’ We have that kind of honest dialogue,” he says. “And sometimes she gets sad, and I’ve had to say ‘Are you eating healthy?’ I always make it a health thing, rather than a concern with appearance. My classic line with my daughters was, ‘You're beautiful, of course!  And are you also feeling healthy?’ They laugh at me now, but it shows my science-based, health-based, and both/and approach to their issues as they grew up.”

Like many other parenting challenges, balance may be key.  And when all else fails, remember that your fatherly love and affection is a powerful force for the good in your daughter’s life.  Polly Payne, a digital marketing assistant in New York, is a vivid example. Her father has been her strongest advocate, she says. “My dad has always been able to make me feel better,” says Payne, 22.  “Like with any young woman, I definitely get insecure about my body image. He always sends me words of encouragement and cards to remind me how proud he is. His words of encouragement and love have brought me to tears.” He’s also sensitive: After spending the summer in Europe, she gained about 15 pounds and was really depressed. But when her father saw her he said, “You just look like you ate well!’ and then told her that she was still so pretty and “any guy would be lucky to know me,” she says.  “He also reminds me that my beauty is inner, which lasts much longer.”

  Published June 16, 2010