Thick Legs

My 7 year old daughter E has been doing dance for a few years now. She has always done ballet, but has also done a few stints of Jazz. Recently, she started to notice that her body was different from the other dancers and wanted to talk about it with Mommy.

What I gathered after my wife brought it up to me was that E realized her legs were thicker than the other girls. The other girls in ballet had thin legs compared to her and E said she didn’t like her body because of it. This was a lot to process for E and also for us as we were wondering why these body image issues were starting so young! We started to tell E that everyone has a different body type and that you have to earn your body, which she clearly earned her thicker legs through lots of swim, dance, hiking, and playing.

E doesn’t have tree trunks for legs and her legs aren’t that thick compared to the other girls in ballet either, but that wasn’t the focus. We didn’t want her to focus on the comparisons. We wanted her to focus on being proud of her own body because she earned those muscles on her legs.

After the quick talk and reinforcement over the next few days, E was back to being her old self and loving her body the way that it is. She needed some reminders that everyone was different and that she earned her body by her hard work. I’m glad we had the conversation again in hindsight because it gave us another opportunity to reinforce that E is great just the way she is!