We examined the sociocultural model of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating attitude development in young girls for the first time. According to the model, internalizing an unrealistically thin ideal body increases the risk of disordered eating via body dissatisfaction, dietary restraint, and depression. Girls aged 7–11 years (N = 127) completed measures of thin-ideal internalization, body dissatisfaction, dieting, depression, and disordered eating attitudes. Participants’ height and weight were measured and their body mass index calculated. Thin-ideal internalization predicted disordered eating attitudes indirectly via body dissatisfaction, dietary restraint, and depression; it also predicted disordered eating attitudes directly. Path analyses showed that a revised sociocultural model fit well with the data. These data show that a sociocultural framework for understanding disordered eating and body dissatisfaction in adults is useful, with minor modifications, in understanding the development of related attitudes in young girls.
Children are not immune to these influences; most are exposed to thin beauty ideals before the age of formal schooling (Blowers et al., 2003 and Dittmar et al., 2006). By 6 or 7 years of age, girls’ level of awareness of the thin ideal body matches that of girls five or six years their senior (Murnen, Smolak, Mills, & Good, 2003). A wealth of research shows that body dissatisfaction and disordered eating attitudes are also common at this point in childhood, particularly amongst girls (for reviews, see Ricciardelli and McCabe, 2001 and Smolak, 2004). Between 40 and 50% of girls aged 7–11 years select an ideal body that is more slender than their current perceived figure (Clark and Tiggemann, 2006, McCabe and Ricciardelli, 2003 and Truby and Paxton, 2002). Disordered eating attitudes are reported by 10–20% of girls of this age in school settings (Erickson and Gerstle, 2007, Rolland et al., 1997 and Sasson et al., 1995), encompassing weight concerns (McCabe & Ricciardelli, 2003), fear of fatness (Shapiro, Newcomb, & Loeb, 1997), intentional weight loss behaviours (McCabe, Ricciardelli, & Holt, 2005), and episodes of loss of control over eating (Field, Camarago, Taylor, Berkey, & Colditz, 1999). These interrelated cognitions and behaviours, whilst less serious and vastly more prevalent than full-threshold eating disorders in children (Nicholls, 2004 and Nicholls et al., 2011), nevertheless threaten girls’ growth and nutritional status (Lask & Bryant-Waugh, 2000). They also predict subsequent chronic weight cycling, obesity, depression, and disordered eating (Field et al., 2001, Field et al., 2002, McVey et al., 2004 and Neumark-Sztainer et al., 2006).
