Is your daughter striving to meet harmful Instagram body challenges? Source: Casia R/Flickr Adolescent girls have long experienced social pressures to be thin and attractive. Yet these pressures are now taking a new and more insidious form, encouraging all girls to emulate an ever more impossible body ideal. You might not be aware that it is very likely your daughter is experiencing pressure not only to be thin and attractive, but also to be curvy with large breasts, a tiny waist, and a rounded backside. She is being pressured to diet and work out—to not only have the “right” curves, to obtain the “right” muscular firmness and tone, but also to have a flat (or even concave), sculpted stomach. It is clear that this ideal of perfection does not come naturally to the vast majority of adolescent girls, but many girls internalize these standards as ones they must achieve.
What is going on in our culture that is fueling these ever more unrealistic body ideals? We have long known that media consumption—viewing television, movies, magazines, music videos—has a direct, negative effect on a girl’s body image. This is definitely nothing new.
But what is new is that (a) images are now perpetually flowing on social media, easily accessed 24/7 on any girl’s phone. It is clear that girls’ frequency and intensity of exposure to body ideals is far greater than it has ever been in the past. And (b) the aspirational images girls are viewing on social media are not primarily of top models and movie stars; instead, they are images of everyday people, seemingly transformed overnight by beauty products, diets, and workouts.
So there are not only millions of images representing the body ideal, but there are also just as many posts that instruct your daughter about how to achieve this ideal. And instead of coming only from ad executives, the images/posts she views are coming from “ordinary” people who tell her that if she works hard enough, if she has the right “look,” if she has the right selfies, then she too can have popularity and even fame.
While there are multiple media sources that contribute to the pressures for girls’ bodies to look a certain way, in this blog, I would like to highlight body challenges on Instagram, an image-based social media platform that strongly perpetuates the body ideal. While much research has demonstrated that social media use is associated with greater body image concerns (Holland & Tiggemann, 2016), viewing and posting pictures on Instagram is particularly harmful to body image, because it is focused on photos (rather than on text) (Fardouly, Willburger, & Vartanian, 2017; Pritchard et al., 2020).
Body challenges are a concerning Instagram trend that continues to shape how girls learn about current body ideals. When a body challenge is issued by a user, thousands of girls all over the world start to post pictures to that particular challenge hashtag to demonstrate how they, too, have met this particular body challenge. I will outline a few challenges from recent years (warning, these are quite alarming):
A Sample of #Body Challenges for Girls:
1. #Cinderella challenge: This challenge is for girls to have a body with the proportions of Cinderella. Girls are challenged to post pictures of their transformation through weight loss and diet into a body of Cinderella’s proportions. The challenge requires that you reach a BMI of 18 or less (which would place a person in the “underweight” category for health classification purposes). For example, someone who is 5'4" would have to be 108 pounds or less to have this BMI.
2. #A4 paper-waist challenge: This challenge involves posts of girls holding a piece of A4 paper in front of their torsos to demonstrate that their waist and torso are so small that they are completely hidden behind the piece of paper.
3. #Collarbone challenge: Girls post photos of themselves balancing coins above their collarbones to see how many they can stack without the whole row toppling over. According to the challenge, the more coins you can balance, the “sexier” you are deemed to be.
4. #Thigh gap challenge: Girls post pictures of their upper thighs. To meet this challenge, when a girl stands with her legs together, there needs to be a gap between her upper thighs. No skin can touch.
5. #Ab crack challenge: Girls post pictures of their torsos to highlight their abdomens. If you have an “ab crack”, this means your abs are defined to the extent that there has formed a shallow, defined ditch down the middle of your stomach.
6. #Underboob pen challenge: Girls post selfies of themselves holding a pen up under their breasts—if your breasts can’t hold the pen up, then they are not “acceptable” (according to this challenge).
7. #Bikini bridge challenge: Girls who meet this challenge post a selfie of the gap between their bikini bottom and their hip bones (indicating a concave stomach)
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Do UV Tanning Beds Really Prolong Lifespan? Taken together, if a girl views these types of posts, she is learning: If I am to be successful or to measure up, I have to (1) have large, perky breasts, (2) have a concave stomach, (3) a stomach that is so muscled that it has a distinct line down my abs, (4) have a waist that is so small it is barely measurable, and (5) be so thin that my collarbone visibly sticks out, my thighs do not touch, and my BMI is so low that it would be of concern to a medical professional. And if I don’t have these attributes, I need to work harder until I do.
Clearly, this is not the standard to which we want our daughters to aspire; we don’t want them to believe they are not good enough if they don’t meet one of these arbitrary (and even medically dangerous) markers of “success.” What can we do instead? Some initial ideas:
- Don’t talk about your own weight or shape, and don’t talk about your daughter’s weight or shape. Help her to understand that women are far more than a collection of their specific body parts (like stomachs, collarbones, waists, or thighs). Promote and appreciate her strengths in all life dimensions, so that she will be less likely to base her worth on whether or not she lives up to culturally defined body ideals.
- Help her to question and critique body ideals, and remind her that most people do not naturally look this way (and also remind her about how many of these images are heavily edited and filtered). Ask her to think about who gets to decide on these standards and why only one body type is considered ideal.
- Encourage her to focus on her body as a source of strength, to appreciate it for all of the things it can do, and to admire the way that it works together as a whole to keep her healthy and strong.
- Help her to expand her beauty ideals by surrounding her with women who represent a broad array of body types and shapes. Encourage her to understand that beauty comes in many diverse shapes and forms, not just one narrowly defined ideal.
- Talk to her about who she follows on Instagram and what she likes about their posts. Encourage her to follow people who have interesting ideas and opinions about things other than beauty and workouts. Help her learn to admire women for their minds and their contributions to the world, not just for how skinny they are, or how well they pose in a bikini selfie, or whether they can balance a handful of coins in their collarbones.