Recently a friend and I were sitting, drinking coffee, reconnecting to our time together as young writers and dreamers in New York. He was in town to publicize his first book, a bit amazed that 20 independent bookstore owners showed up at a local restaurant the previous night to hear his thoughts.
But our careers seemed to matter less for a few minutes. We were talking about our children, especially our daughters. His little girl is 6, mine is 3.
“She’s already wondering if she is fat,” says my friend. “She is this beautiful girl who is somehow getting the wrong message.”
I say that’s scary because my friend and his wife are exactly the type of parents who would be positive about body image no matter what shape their daughter might be. I mention a nutritionist — a nutritionist — who told me about a whole group of Brownies (including her own 8-year-old daughter) refusing a snack for fear of too many fat grams.
These are not isolated incidents, and Father’s Day is an ideal time to make the point. The question is, what can fathers do about a daughter’s body image and emotional health?
Dads & Daughters is an activist organization with some answers. One founding member joined specifically because his 9-year-old girl walked up to him one day and asked, “Daddy, do I look fat?” He figured there was added significance to the girl asking him and not the mother.
“Both answers (yes or no) are wrong,” says Joe Kelly, father of 19-year-old twin daughters and executive director of the Duluth, Minn.-based DADs. “We have work to do. Research shows 30 percent of 9-year-old girls have already tried some sort of diet.”
Kelly and his DADs co-founders are blazing an accessible trail. Kelly is a former Minnesota Public Radio commentator/producer and co-founder (with his wife) of an “alternative” teenage girls magazine, New Moon. DADs has an informative Internet site (www.dadsanddaughters.org), a biweekly electronic newsletter that has attracted 1,700 paying members in 14 months (members choose their own donation amount) and a weekly radio show that airs in Boulder, Colo., on KWAB-AM (1490) but can also be heard at www.workingforchange.com/radio on the Internet.
Most impressive is the monthly “media actions” that urge DADs’ members to write e-mails or letters. A recent example is the group’s lead role in a campaign to stop Simon & Schuster from publishing a CD-ROM game last month entitled “Panty Raider: From Here to Immaturity.” The game’s object is to convince supermodels to take off their clothes, stripping to their lingerie, then take photos and deliver them to three sex-starved aliens who are threatening to blow up the Earth in “hormone-driven anger.” Enticement for the supermodels include canned pickup lines, credit cards or a lunch of tiny breath mints that “no self-respecting supermodel can resist,” according to promotional materials.
“You would think I am making up this stuff,” says Kelly.
DADs and other participating organizations didn’t stop Simon & Schuster but called considerable media attention to the game. Every conversation helps.
“It starts with listening to our daughters, what they are thinking and feeling,” says Kelly. “Any way you can encourage them to be physically active is another plus. Studies show girls whose fathers played hoops with them or games of catch or other sports turn out to have fewer pregnancies, they don’t put up with abusive relationship, and they drink and smoke less.”
Kelly says he looks to Mothers Against Drunk Driving for inspiration.
“It’s not cool anymore to drink and drive because those mothers took a personal experience and generalized it to society,” says Kelly. “I can only hope in the years ahead we don’t accept dieting among 9-year-olds or ad campaigns with slogans like Inner beauty only goes so far.’
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“Fathers have to lend their voice. We have to be foot soldiers in the effort to change cultural values.”
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To contact Bob Condor or find an archive of his columns, visit chicagotribune.com/go/health
His e-mail is [email protected]