Rita Templeton is a regular mom, running a household with four little boys. And she’s doing a fantastic job at raising them. Starting early on in life, what Templeton aims to do is ensure that her boys don’t grow up with a skewed perception of the female body. In her beautiful piece published on Huffington Post , she talks about the body image issues that every woman is exposed to and explains why she does not want her boys to be perpetrators of the same.
“Instilling a positive body image is not an issue reserved for people with daughters – and for boys, it involves not only making them confident about their own bodies, but also letting them know that real is beautiful when it comes to the opposite sex.”
The FightingFrumpy.com blogger is bringing her A-game at raising her kids into a bunch of fine gentlemen. Her parenting strategy includes subtly exposing her boys to the female body -her own – so that they grow up with their own perceptions of beauty, unaltered by the standards set by society.
So, despite the fact that she is not entirely in love with her postpartum body, she puts it across to her babies that her flab and her stretch marks are badges she’s earned from having borne them, and that she is proud of having them.
“Because for right now, for these few formative years, my flab is their one and only perception of the female body. And I want them to know that it’s beautiful, even in its imperfection,” she writes.
Although it does make her uncomfortable at times, Templeton does not shy away from changing clothes in front of her boys, or taking a shower with the door open. She makes it clear that she wants her boys to have a perception of the female body which is not overtly sexualised and does not conform to the impossibly perfect standards of beauty.
“I want them to know that this is the norm, not the nipped-tucked-and-digitally-enhanced images they’re going to be bombarded with.”
What Templeton wants her sons to understand is that real is in fact beautiful, and that the ” boobs that are as round and firm as cantaloupes and pictures of taut, airbrushed, dimple-less butts” aren’t the norm.
All images owned by the author Rita Templeton
“Because while they’re young, I want to plant the seed so that when they’re older, and their wives say, “I wish my thighs were smaller,” my sons can say, “They’re perfect just the way they are.”
And mean it,” she signs off.
In an age plagued by body image issues, could this be an effective parenting strategy? You decide.
