Cultivating Positive Embodiment Through The Family Environments

Abstract

This chapter explicates how families can cultivate girls’ positive embodiment. First, families can cultivate girls’ body connection and comfort by creating an environment that accepts children’s bodies (type, size, and weight); practicing mind–body connection activities such as yoga; and fostering positive body expression (e.g., positive body talk, supporting style preferences). Second, families can promote girls’ acting in and on the world with agency by preserving, cultivating, and restoring their voice and by promoting their body functionality. Third, families can encourage girls’ experience and expression of desire by enhancing the pleasures of eating (e.g., intuitive eating) and nurturing attuned sexuality (e.g., body respect, asserting sexual agency). Fourth, families can teach and reinforce actionable practices that promote attuned self-care. Last, families can build inner characteristics in girls (e.g., personality, intellect) while also helping girls protest, resist, and defy normative pressures to self-objectify via engaging in media literacy and social activism.