“Love yourself” is a message you really need to drive home to your children. A child who ties her self-worth to her body size won't be truly happy at any weight. But when popular culture propagates the message that fat is bad from an early age, it can be a hard attitude to combat. The problem is compounded by images of impossibly perfect bodies that bombard children every time they turn on the television or pick up a magazine.

Expose your child to role models with healthy body types, in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, to instill a positive body image. Teaching your child to celebrate physical diversity will benefit her in other areas of her life as well.

For older children and adolescents, it's a good idea to start a dialogue about how the media, and advertising in particular, works to shape our opinions about body image. Children and adolescents are especially susceptible to the overriding themes in American culture that thin is in and fat is ugly (which they perceive as a judgment of their own self-worth). Teach your child to evaluate what he sees in magazines and on television with a critical eye and to understand how marketing and mass media shape popular conceptions of “beauty.” Appendix B has some excellent resources for educating children about media literacy.