How can we help them resist it? By teaching them to be critical consumers of media. I think the schools are doing work in that aspect. I think there is a difference between eating disorders and disordered eating. I think we have to differentiate between the two. My experience, and I know the experience of many parents, is that they will say they don't feel the media actually contributed to their child's eating disorder in the sense that they feel they didn't start it, that it wasn't the precipitating factor. It may have contributed to maintaining the eating disorder once their children became ill, but they didn't see it as a precipitating factor. I think actually teaching our children how to be critical and how to understand the images and the media messages that they're receiving is important.
On March 5th, 2014. See this statement in context.