“Growing up, I used to dance and I think I’ve carried a lot of those body issues on for a very long time and it’s something I’m conscious about not passing on. Raising a young girl is a privilege but it doesn’t come without its gravity and responsibility,” Fookes says.
To be a child during the 1980s and 90s in Australia, as most parents of today’s young kids did, meant living through the era of Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers and a seemingly endless parade of other fad diets, being constantly bombarded with unfounded myths like ‘water being an appetite suppressant’, and every single magazine cover being adorned in diet advice. And though times are changing, it seems we still have a long way to go.
Dame Edna Everidge performs a Zumba fitness dance for weight loss company Jenny Craig in Sydney in January 2013.Credit:Mick Tsikas
“Even now, the data shows us that 91 per cent of adult women want to be thinner and that plays out in what we see in kids. For boys, it’s predominantly wanting to be leaner or to have more muscle but in girls, it’s always about being thinner,” Yager says.
For Fookes, change has included ensuring there are no scales in the house and celebrating what the body can do rather than how it looks.
“It’s not that I had an unhappy childhood by any means,” Fookes says, “but I think we parent a lot more consciously and openly and empathetically these days and a lot of it is about unlearning those things we saw and heard growing up and making a really active decision to not pass on that behaviour to my daughter.”
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Yager agrees, saying the course is not about shaming previous generations or telling parents that up to this point they’ve been doing it the wrong way.
“It’s about empowering parents to have really lovely and positive conversations with their kids,” she says. “That can be something as small as putting on a bandaid and talking about how clever the body is because it can heal a cut in a couple of days. The aim is to see our kids happy and healthy in their bodies and loving themselves.”
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