Happy and healthy

There’s no getting away from the fact that peer pressure will dictate that they go around looking completely ludicrous for a few years, but that doesn’t have to mean dedicating their lives to the ludicrous look. My fifteen-year-old sister, for example, wears enormous longer-than-floor-length flares, tiny little bra-style t-shirts and she dyes her hair a sort of streaky red. She’s also a successful cellist and goes on week-long courses where they spend their whole time snogging and playing their instruments. You’re never going to get children to ignore their appearance entirely, but making sure they have a million other things to do must stop it being their main priority.

It seems to me that not thinking about food (apart from enjoying eating it), not focussing in any way on appearance, not addressing body image at all is the best way of dealing with it. If they’ve always got something else to think about, children will be naturally happy and sexy. Nobody who’s making too much effort ever looks good and nobody who’s fussy about food is a good dinner date.

If people stopped saying, ‘Isn’t she pretty’ about little girls they’d understand that prettiness is not the key to anything much. Or at least, that it has very little to do with your weight or outfit and a lot to do with your enthusiasm for life and your own state of mind. Attractiveness is a confidence trick that isn’t achieved by dieting or preening. That’s what everyone needs to remember.