• Posted March 11, 2025

Body Image Problems Start In Childhood, Researchers Say

People start developing unhealthy perceptions of their own bodies in early childhood, a new study suggests.

Kids as young as 7 start to judge their bodies in ways that eventually could lead to an eating disorder, researchers report in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

“It has been clear for many years that we need to be wary about visual media which present only a narrow range of bodies, because this affects adults’ body perceptions,” lead researcher Lynda Boothroyd, a professor of psychology at Durham University in the U.K., said in a news release.

“Now we know that’s true for children, too,” she continued. “Even very neutral images can adjust their ideas about what is heavy or thin if they see enough of the same kind of body.”

Unrealistic body images can foster negative self-assessment, causing people to strive for “perfection,” the Mental Health Foundation says. This can lead to eating and mood disorders.

For the new research, Boothroyd and her colleagues ran a series of experiments involving children 7 to 15 years old as well as adults. In all, nearly 300 people participated in the study.

Participants were shown photographs of people with varying BMIs, and were asked to judge how “heavy” or “light” each person was. (BMI is shorthand for body mass index, a measure of body fat based on height and weight.)

People of all ages significantly changed their perceptions of weight after being shown images of people who are clinically overweight or obese, results show.

Specifically, children and adults were more likely to lower their weight estimates after being shown images of high-BMI people, researchers said.

These findings indicate that people’s perceptions of body weight are evolving from as young as age 7, researchers argue.

“Researchers often assume that children’s body perceptions and their ideas about body image work the same way as adults,” Boothroyd said. “We’ve shown that that’s true, down to seven years, for basic perceptual impacts on body weight perception.”

Previous research has found that media representations of body types cause white women in Western nations to experience greater pressure to stay thin, compared to Black Nigerian and Chinese women across all ages, researchers noted.

“We have demonstrated that perceptions of body weight are subject to adaptation aftereffects that are adult-like from 7 years of age onward,” researchers concluded.

“Thus, these results have implications for our understanding of body size (mis)perception in health and well-being contexts as well as for our broader understanding of the development of body perception,” they added.

More information

The Mental Health Foundation has more about body image.

SOURCES: Durham University, news release, March 5, 2025; Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, March 5, 2025