IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:THE LIB Dems over the water have called for a ban on airbrushing ads aimed at children to tackle "body image pressure". Nice thought, no chance. Next they'll want Gerry Ryan to keep his opinions to himself, writes ADAM BROPHY
Further to that, they want cosmetic surgery adverts to give their success rates. How will that work? Twenty five per cent of boob job patients wish they’d busted a gut and gone straight to Jordan size?
But their most outlandish request is that sports centres be made safer and cleaner in a bid to be more female friendly. So, if I’m reading this right, they want advertising to be completely honest (am ducking here while pigs fly by in a game of tag with Willy Wonka) and the world of sports to tidy itself up.
To increase good health they want advertising to get grubby and real, but sport to live up to the unnaturally shiny standards set, oh yeah, by advertising.
All this is in a bid to protect women and girls from pressures about their weight, and also to promote healthy living. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Pity that, as is usual with most promotions to increase wellbeing, it’s grounded in a world far removed from the one most of us live in, particularly where young girls grow up on a diet of Heat magazine and Pot Noodle.
If you live like Wayne and Waynetta Slob, you’re not going to transform into the lovechild of Sonia O’Sullivan and Jason Sherlock just because your local sports centre washes its windows.
Getting healthy takes a bit of effort and a lot of sweat. Staying healthy requires that effort to become a habit. Most habits are learned at home.
The elder child is a whippet. She stops moving during the day to watch TV when a programme features either horses or sharks, or maybe Scooby Doo. They’re an odd group of interests but their shared element seems to be constant motion.
She is stretching now, becoming tall and lean. Thanks to a combination of her mother’s healthy feeding and her own desire to try every activity on her horizon she is as fit as the proverbial fiddle.
I could be smug about this, but I don’t think any dad can afford to be complacent about the way his daughter looks at her body. She grabbed at the flesh on her stomach yesterday and asked me if she was fat. Fortunately, she was joking but the telling point is that she is already conscious of a negative attitude towards carrying weight, particularly for women.
That’s a tough burden to bear from the time you’re seven years old.
The younger, on the other hand, is more robust. She may or may not stretch lanky like her sister but for now she is mighty proud of her belly. She claims it is the biggest in Ireland and likes to frame it with her hands, march about and show it off.
She, too, is super healthy and active, but not yet tainted by any sort of body image concerns.
It’ll come though, it’s unavoidable, and expecting advertising companies not to play on that sensitivity is like getting up in the morning and hoping someone else will go into work for you.
The benefits of getting kids involved in sport are large and obvious but, to me, the actual health implications for a young child in taking part are outweighed by the extras.
They join the local football/soccer/camogie/rugby team and they roll in mud with a load of other boisterous screaming brats.
They learn to work together, respect and understand each other’s skills and weaknesses, they have a feeling of belonging. If they’re lucky this might be the first place they feel they belong outside the family. If they’re unlucky it might be the only place they feel they belong.
You can’t sanitise this. You can’t make it attractive by cleaning it up as if it were a health spa.
The nature of sport is that it’s greasy and unattractive and what makes it most important is that, in an era of over-emphasis on beauty and perfection, sport offers kids the chance to get mucky and messy together.
The competitive edge will come as skills and interests develop, but at the outset it’s the testing of new experiences in the company of their peers that’s fascinating to them.
I would be content in my parenting achievements if I were to learn in later years that the younger’s party piece was to barrel around her football team’s dressing room bragging about the size of her gut, towel-flicking skinny girls into submission. But what are the odds?