- Super thin models, flawless looking skin, it's everywhere, TVs, magazines, social media, every day our kids are inundated with unrealistic images of how they should look, how they should act, who they should be.

What is a healthy self-image and how can parents talk to our kids about these media images?

That's next on IQ Smartparent.

(upbeat music) (audience applauding) Hi, I'm Dr. Debbie Gilboa.

On this episode of IQ Smartparent, we're gonna talk about how girls are portrayed in the media and how that impacts their decisions, their behaviors, even their self-worth.

Advertisements are everywhere.

In fact, the average girl, sees about 500 ads every single day.

And they're overwhelming, the images of shockingly thin models, images by the way that are mostly unattainable and dangerously unhealthy.

Here's a statistic for you.

The average American model, is five foot 11 inches tall and weighs 117 pounds.

This makes the average healthy American woman, who is five foot, four inches tall and 145 pounds, feel really overweight when she's not.

Women and girls are constantly being told that they have to change their appearance, to try to be beautiful.

Common Sense Media, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families, by evaluating media and technology, has this to say.

♪ When we in the club, all eyes on us.

♪ - [Announcer] Beauty is no longer just in the eye of the beholder.

It has become an impossible and skewed idea of what's perfect.

- [Instructor] The actress shows off her amazing physique for GQ, Mexico.

- [Announcer] And this new standard, isn't just manufactured.

It's unforgiving and it's everywhere.

- [Narrator] It makes you look fat, it makes you look dumpy.

- [Announcer] Whether on TV, in magazines, music videos or even social media, the message is the same for all women.

Beauty is only achieved by changing your appearance.

- [Instructor] For lashes, the more outrageous, the better.

- [Announcer] For young girls, the pressure can be overwhelming.

The message they're getting is that they would be happier, more popular and even sexier, if only they lost weight, got killer abs and thinned those thighs.

- The portrayal of women in the media has also become increasingly sexualized.

So what messages are we sending our girls and also our boys?

I'm excited to introduce our first guest.

We're thrilled to have with us today, Dr. Meenakshi Gigi Durham.

She's the professor of journalism and gender, women's and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa.

And she's also the author of the bestselling book, "The Lolita Effect, The Media Sexualization of Young Girls, and Five Keys to Fixing It."

Dr. Durham, thank you so much for coming today.

- Thank you for having me.

- So, your a book really opened my eyes to something that after I saw it seemed obvious, how did I miss that?

And so could you talk a little bit about what the Lolita effect is?

- Yeah the Lolita effect refers to the myths of sexuality that circulate in the media, particularly media that's aimed at children and young girls.

So there's sort of five aspects to the Lolita effect or five prevalent myths that I saw.

I did extensive studies and I've been studying this for years and years, and I looked at magazines, television shows, films, websites, video games, just a whole range of media that are aimed at children and especially at girls and the myths that circulate, most consistently and most, repeatedly are, the first one is if you've got it flaunt it.

So to be sexual, you have to sort of bear as much of your body as possible, but it's a condition.

You can only do it, if you've got it right?

- And who decides what it is.

- Right who decides what it is and who decides, who has it, right?

So that if part depends on the condition that you have a particular kind of body, which I call the anatomy of a sex goddess, which is the second myth.

- Which doesn't actually sound bad when you put it that way.

So what do you mean?

- But in fact, it's a really unrealistic unattainable standard of beauty, that's perpetuated in the media where you have to have an extremely thin body, as in the images that you just showed, but at the same time, be very voluptuous.

- And that sex goddess image is an image for adults to attain?

- No it's absolutely the standard for everyone to try to attain, anyone, adult or child, and one of the huge problems with that body is that it really isn't a body found in nature, right?

I mean, because if you're very thin, you're usually not very voluptuous.

And so it's a body that requires, borderline starvation and excessive exercise, but also plastic surgery.

So it's just not, yeah, it's not a natural body.

- So when you say children, how young are they seeing this pressure?

- Oh, it pervades our media environment.

Everyone knows that.

So, even babies and toddlers are being exposed to it.

It's everywhere.

You can't get away from it.

And it's the only body that you ever see represented as ideal.

- So, what is it that really young girls are seeing that would lead them consciously or subconsciously to think that that's what they should look like?

- [Dr. Gigi] Well, it's just that you don't see any kind of diversity, you really don't see a range of bodies represented and you certainly don't see any sort of realistic body represented.

- [Dr Debbie] Oh yeah.

- So, and again, they're all held up.

I mean, one of the things that we look at in media studies is sort of the cues that you're given when you see these bodies.

And so when they're accompanied by texts that says glamor or cosmopolitan, or self, then certainly the implication is this is what it you're-- - This should be yourself.

- This should be yourself.

This is what you're supposed to look like.

The third myth, which I find to be the most troubling and the most problematic is that, the youth is tied to sexuality.

And so in some sense, the younger you are, the more desirable you are.

And this is a trend that we've seen really in recent years, escalating to an alarming degree where a lot of the, models that are in especially fashion magazine, advertising, and so on, some of them are as young as 13, 12, some of them are even prepubescent.

And yet they're presented in very provocative and seductive sorts of poses.

- And how can they be full up if they're prepubescent?

What is happening there?

- Well again there's plastic surgery.

And there's also a lot of makeup and digital manipulation that goes into making very young girls, look, to match this ideal.

- So they're Photoshopping girls to look a decade older than they actually are.

- Well, their faces are still very young.

So you can tell, I mean, it's a really, and one of the things that, this is again, as I said, recent.

So, if you look back, I mean, we've always had sort of icons of beauty that's, been true throughout the ages.

But for example, Marilyn Monroe was 29 years old, when she was in gentlemen, prefer blondes.

So she was a fully adult woman with an adult woman's body.

But now we're looking at very young girls and that's frightening because, the World Health Organization estimates that one in four girls is sexually abused, so.

- One in four girls, that's amazing, in such a horrible way.

So you're talking about that our girls are hearing that sex and violence go together.

That sexualization is the goal and the ideal that they should try and look as much like a grownup as they can while still retaining that youthful, whatever it is that people are looking for.

So if I'm looking at this and I have sons, or you're looking at this and you have daughters, what should we be saying to our kids when they're watching a Disney movie?

- Yeah.

Well, I think, it's interesting that you bring up Disney because even in Disney films, as many people have recognize, the princess bodies that, are presented there, they fit the same model.

They're thin yet voluptuous and they're young, and these are media aimed at very young children.

So yes, you have to engage in conversations with them about it because, it's giving them a very powerful message about what girls roles are and what girls bodies are supposed to look like.

- And even that's evolving, right?

I know that snow white was meant to be, I think like a size eight, which might not be everybody's body size, but now we're seeing, Mulan in Alladins.

Okay, and I feel like just my own sense, having seen the movies that these are girls that are much skinnier, they're just drawn to have these.

- They are really unrealistically thin most of them, like Jasmine is very, very, very thin.

And there have been studies done on not specifically on Disney, but on the proportions of the Barbie dolls for example, from the 1950s to the present where they have, their bodies have changed significantly to be much thinner and much more voluptuous.

In fact, one medical analysis of current day body, estimated that her proportions would be something like, I'm not sure I have this exactly right, but something like a five foot tall 10 woman, who weighed a hundred pounds who had a 38 inch chest.

- I can that's not really compatible with life, as a doctor, that's not really, you're gonna fall right over.

- Exactly, she would be too thin to stand up.

Exactly, and she wouldn't be, she just should fall right over it, and yeah, so right.

The body is totally unrealistic and the proportions have changed over the years, to conform to what is currently presented as ideal.

You brought up another aspect of the myth, which is that violence is sexy, which is also very, very troubling, especially because teen dating violence is on the rise.

And so in, for example, horror films, which are aggressively marketed, especially to young boys, it's usually right when the girl is undressing or right when there's a sexual situation that all the mayhem happens.

And so sex and violence are very closely linked in those sorts of media.

- So what should I say to my sons, if they're interested in watching movie like that, or they've seen a movie like that, what message can I give them?

- Well I think absolutely, you can start talking to them about it, right?

I mean, I think it's important to bring it up.

You asked me this earlier.

I think all of this is important to bring up, like when my daughters were very young and they're 12 and 15 now, but even when they were tiny and they were watching, for example, a Disney movie, I would say things like, do you really think anybody could breathe, if they had a waist that skinny?

Do you really think that she could live and they start laughing and say, no, nobody could really be that skinny.

And so it helped them even at a very young age to sort of differentiate fact and fiction.

And I think-- - [Dr Debbie] So we're building a little skepticism.

- Yeah, you can build on that.

And for boys, I think it would be important to talk about, the horror genre, for example, to point out that it's right at the, sexual moment that the, violence happens and sort of ask them what they think about it.

So I think one of the really important things that parents can do is engage kids in conversations about what's going on in the media.

- It's true.

There's a really groundbreaking documentary that I know you're familiar with called "Killing Us Softly", that has been in new iterations, showing us that this problem isn't going away.

And so we're gonna take a look at that now.

- [Announcer] Even the loveliest celebrities are transformed by computer.

Keira Knightley is given a bigger bust, Jessica Alba is made smaller, Kelly Clarkson, well, this is an interesting, it says slim down your way, but she in fact, slimmed down the Photoshop way.

You almost never see a photograph of a woman considered beautiful that hasn't been photo-shopped.

- Every picture has been worked on some 20,30 rounds going back and forth between the retouchers and the client and the agency.

They are perfected to to death.

- [Announcer] The dove commercial called evolution, dramatically illustrates that the image is constructed.

It is not real.

(upbeat music) So the image isn't real, it's artificial, it's constructed, but real women and girls, measure ourselves against this image every single day.

- That's amazing.

The changes that are created, that we then take as real or natural.

There are a lot of reactions that adults might have for that, but I think one of the things that's most instructive is we would like to know, what do girls think when they see those images.

And we're gonna pick on a couple of our audience members tonight, and we're very grateful to have them here.

And I'd like to ask you if it's okay, when you watch that, does this seem to you like a genuine problem, that girls your age need a little bit of help to navigate?

- Yeah, I do think it's a problem because there are girls in school districts and in my school that I've seen that try to cover themselves with makeup to try to make their eyes look bigger, or their face look smoother with cover up and stuff.

And I think it's just from stuff like that picture, that they see this person with a perfect face and they just want to be that perfect.

And so they're putting their selves at risk kind of.

- Well, it's true, right?

All the eating disorders put people at risk and this idea of having to fix things all the time.

Do you think if you asked, the girls that you know at school, do you think that's totally real or partially made up, would they know that it's partially made up?

- If we hadn't been told that it is all fake, then I think they would have thought that it was real and that they could try to achieve something like that, even though it's obviously not possible.

- That's absolutely true.

And we have with us tonight, Jocelyn Perry, Jocelyn is on her way to earning her gold award from the Girl Scouts, which is the highest honor she can achieve.

And as a part of that journey, she has used the very dove commercial that we saw, that creation of beauty and what we're considering beauty, and she's using it to teach middle school girls so that they know the very things that the girl sitting next to her was talking about.

And so Jocelyn, I'm hoping you can tell us, what are the reactions that you get from middle school girls when you teach them about this?

- Okay.

So when I was talking to the girls, we talked a lot about the definition we have of beauty and the standards we hold ourselves to, and we would look at the media and everything.

We see all these celebrities that are perfect, they have flawless faces, flawless hair, perfect bodies, and we wanna be that, we try to achieve that standard of beauty.

And that's how we see beauty in our everyday lives.

But we talked about creating more of a definition of beauty, that is, what we see on the streets, what we see in ourselves and seeing that inner beauty and just making ourselves perfect the way we are.

- Is it true that these are girls that you've been talking to, who have been looking to celebrities, to see what they should look like and what they should be?

- Definitely.

I think everyone looks to be like Angelina Jolie and not like someone like their mom, that they could really be looking to as beautiful.

- So here's a picture of Angelina Jolie, that we'd like to look at to get a sense of, what does this beautiful woman look like, and is that good enough?

So Dr. Durham, can you talk to us a little bit about what we're seeing here and why?

- [Dr. Gigi] Yeah.

I mean, clearly the photo of Angela Jolie has been touched up the one on the right.

To begin with, she's a beautiful woman.

She doesn't really need any modification as far as I'm concerned.

And yet clearly, the media thinks she does need correction, she does need fixing.

The thing that strikes me immediately is that her skin has been retouched to, the point where it looks almost plastic.

I mean, it has no unevenness whatsoever.

It's completely-- - [Dr Debbie] It's true.

If you told me that was a doll of Angelina Jolie I would absolutely believe you.

- [Dr. Gigi] It does look like that.

- [Dr Debbie] Because it looks like it could have been molded in a machine.

- [Dr. Gigi] Like a wax figure or something like that, right?

I mean, she.

- [Dr Debbie] We're gonna look at a couple of images of celebrities sort of a before and after.

And I really find this very interesting, because if you had asked me, which is the real picture here, I would actually say the picture on the right, because that's the one I see.

And so we get this idea that if we see it, it must be true, when actually the changes that have been made in this particular singer are really astounding.

I wouldn't necessarily peg them as being in the same family.

- [Dr. Gigi] Yeah I think, I mean, if people and people never see the before and after images of this digital retouching.

I mean no one ever sees what it looks like before, but if you look at them side by side like this, you can, I mean, anyone can see just how much the image has been altered.

I mean, they've added hair, for example, they've definitely smoothed out the skin so on, they've changed the body.

- [Dr Debbie] When you look at this picture of Faith Hill, the picture on the left, I think is magazine cover worthy, right?

It would not surprise me at all to see that, but clearly they didn't think that it was.

What are some of the changes that you think are the most telling that they're showing here?

- [Dr. Gigi] Again a woman who would be striking anyway, but they've had, they still see the need for correction.

And, interestingly, all signs of aging have been removed, right?

So any sort of little, the wrinkle under her eye, for example, the little pouch under her eyes, the lines, on either side of her nose, those have been softened.

- And in the same magazine where on the inside, you might very well expect to find an article about embracing who you are and loving your lines for what they mean.

Here we have a picture of Demi Moore and the way she looks on the right, I feel actually as a woman of a similar age, Hey, I could totally look like that.

That's entirely possible.

And then I look at her on the left and, honestly, it took an army of people to make me look the way I look tonight.

What in the world does it take to make someone look like like that?

- It takes a computer?

I mean, that was a machine generated image.

All of them were machine generated.

So, it's not just the army of people.

It's not just the makeup and the lighting, it's completely mechanically constructed these images.

- It's absolutely true.

Okay, so here's a question, we know, as an, I know that as children develop, they start around the age of 18 months or two years old to develop this sense of self.

And it becomes really clear that they have an idea about, me do it right?

And it has this great self-esteem behind it.

And that self-esteem is meant to grow and grow and grow as they become actualized as adults.

But what we're seeing in the literature now is that somewhere around the age of nine, 10, 11, maybe as young as eight, that girls are peaking in their self-esteem, and then they're starting to have this kinda self-esteem slide down the backside.

What's responsible for that?

- Well, I mean, this is really an unfortunate trend too, because in the mid nineties, when Mary Peiffer is reviving Ophelia first came out and there were a number of studies of girls, they marked 13 as the point where that self-esteem drop happened and now we're seeing it in even younger girls.

It's interesting to me, it used to be sort of heading towards puberty that sort of mark the change, now, I think it really is, it does have something to do.

I mean, it's complicated and I can't say this is the only factor, but I do think being in a media saturated environment, where these images are the only ones they ever see of what women are supposed to be like, or girls even are supposed to be like, it's affecting that.

- So as parents and educators, we can't wait until our kids are in middle school or junior high to talk about these issues.

- We can't.

No, we can't.

We have to begin at a very, very young age because one thing that's going on too is that marketers are very aware that children do, form their ideas about, femininity and masculinity at very young ages.

And they're aggressively marketing a certain ideology of femininity even to very, very young girls, because they wanna create cradle to grave consumers of products.

- Cradle to grave consumers, right.

That's what I want my kid to be, right?

I wanted to have children so I could create marketing consumers.

- But that's what they're pushing.

I mean, that's the whole, one of the very important motivations behind these images, because the images they're not, sort of cultural norms, they're actually being, they're being created and they're being, marketed in this way because they generate an awful lot of revenues.

- [Dr Debbie] It makes money.

That's the answer.

- Right, because these images, these completely unattainable bodies can only be achieved through the consumption of products, right?

So, people think that if they consume sufficient, cosmetics, diet aids, constricting garments like Spanx or whatever, a lot of tools, plastic surgery, there's a multi-billion dollar industry behind it.

So the images have to be unattainable, but people have to believe they can attain them through consumption.

- And it's amazing that they've created this.

Okay.

So I'm gonna press you, give me a tip, a tip for parents to talk about this issue.

- Yeah, so I think that's a really important one too, is to help children be aware of the, profit motives that are behind these images.

Again, you can begin very young.

Even when my children were little, it wasn't necessarily about sexuality or about beauty or anything but even if we saw an ad for cereal for example, I'd say, why do you think they're saying that sugary cereal is part of a healthy breakfast, when we know it's not healthy, right?

And sort of getting them to think more critically about advertising so that as they get older, then you can talk about, profit motives and why advertisers are telling you that you can attain these things through buying products.

- So maybe the good news about our kids seeing 500 ads a day is that there are plenty of opportunities and we don't have to take every single one, but there are plenty of opportunities to have these conversations.

- There are plenty of opportunities for these conversations and they're crucial.

- So media, we talk about advertising and body image, and that's one thing we wanna discuss.

We also wanna talk about social media and its effect on girls.

And that's what we'll talk about when we come back.

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- We all know social media can have a great deal of influence on preteen and teenage girls.

Social media is a fact of life.

In fact, in our audience right now, we have a featured blogger, who's tweeting about all of these important issues.

But whether it's Facebook, Twitter, texting, Instagram, Snapchat, a recent study by Common Sense Media, showed that 77% of girls text every day.

For many girls, technology plays a huge role in their relationships.

But along with that comes a whole new set of pressures and challenges.

So what should parents be aware of and how can we help our kids safely navigate social media?

Rebecca Gaynier joins us.

She is the founder and CEO of Itwixie.com This is a safe community where girls can go to meet friends and be creative, where they can really be themselves without the worry about content and privacy, that parents have with so many unmoderated social networking sites.

Rebecca, thank you very much for joining us.

- Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so psyched to be here.

This is a really interesting conversation because we've talked with Dr. Durham about all the ways that our kids are bombarded by advertising, but social media feels like something that they're actively taking part in, right?

They're creating a persona.

They're getting to show their best selves.

What really happens when girls get to interact with each other online?

- Well, it's really fascinating actually, because when you put a bunch of kids, imagine even on a playground, would you really put a bunch of kids out on a playground and say, there you go, kids, and then walk out of that situation and just see what happens?

- Is it bad to go to the coffee shop next door?

- It's kind of a bad idea in general, but that's what we've done.

We've done that to our kids.

We've allowed them to go into this space to be social and we've left them alone.

And so what can happen is a lot of things can happen.

If somebody is a little aggressive, maybe that will play out.

If no one stands up to that person, cyber bullying can take place.

If nobody stands up to that situation, it can escalate into more violence.

And that's what we're seeing on unmoderated spaces online.

So in those unmoderated spaces, is it just a question of normal school yard stuff playing out, but playing out digitally, or is there really a leveling up?

Is there really an opportunity for kids to do things they wouldn't do if they were face-to-face?

- Absolutely we see a lot of girls, especially because girls are more prevalently online than boys really kind of stepping up their game, trying to showcase what their lives are like.

They post a lot about, their best lives, their best friends, their best life experiences, which can make a lot of kids who maybe don't have the best life, best life experience, or aren't posing as such, to end up feeling really bad about themselves.

And that's why I founded Itwixie to really celebrate the authentic girl.

We don't showcase life events that are fake because the girls don't post about life events that are fake because they don't have to, they are girls that are unrelated.

Their communities are broad, diverse, and international in scope, and they don't really even know who they are, they have made up names.

So they aren't driven to try to impress each other in that kind of a way, and they really delve deeply into their authentic experience.

- I think that's really terrific because I just read it recently a study about Facebook that showed that teenage girls who were posting on Facebook often try to emulate the media images in their self representations.

And so the photographs they use are often in provocative poses and, trying very hard to sort of look like the magazine models.

And so I think it's great that you have an alternative space for them.

- Well, thank you.

- A girl that I saw in my practice told me that she and her friends call it fake book, right?

Instead of Facebook.

- Well I think you can't blame the kids to a large extent because yes, they have media messages that are kind of supporting that and adults do the same thing.

- We were saying that grown ups would never do that.

That's absolutely not the case.

But one of the things that we do know is that in studies with teens and preteens, with depression and anxiety, which are real mental illness issues, they rate their symptoms as worse on days when they use unmoderated social media, right?

So on days when they decide, or they just try it out to see what it's like to turn off social media, they feel better.

They actually, we see that we flip it around and say, maybe social media networking is actually making the symptoms worse.

Not that they're creating the illness, but that they're making symptoms worse.

And does that have to do with this fake idea?

- It makes perfect sense if you think about it.

If you have a situation again, it's like the wild, wild west.

We have an unmoderated on really unknown space where we're allowing all these kids in their most impressionable years of their lives, to experiment with being social and just like the wild, wild west, sometimes you have kind of the characters who really don't deserve the best attention, get the attention because they are most sensationalistic.

That's why, when you think about role modeling and the possibility of a social media experience, empowering a girl, helping her actually reach out to another girl around the country, around the world and actually lift her up, that would be really cool.

And those kinds of dynamics are expensive.

They're difficult to create, but they can be done.

And I think that you can, see that possibility take place.

Sites like Itwixie, where you can really create the opportunity to showcase how girls can celebrate their power and actually empower each other.

- And we know that parents wanna do that.

We have a question from the audience just now.

- Hi, my name's Lily Oppenheimer.

I'm from Mount Lebanon high school.

And I agree with the fact that the media negatively impacts girl's self-confidence.

I mean, my sophomore year I witnessed a girl, I never saw her face, but every day, she was vomiting in the stall next to me and never saw her face.

And it just made me really sad, but I'm not sure I agree with the message in the Lolita effect that the media encourages sexual violence like rape, and I was just wondering, are there any statistics to or surveys to back that up or isn't that kind of like saying a girl is sexually abused based on what she wears or how beautiful she is?

- I think that's a really great question.

And I'm glad that that hasn't been your experience that you've seen that.

So, Dr. Durham, what did you find that led you to that conclusion?

- Right.

I don't wanna compare those two things at all because I wanna very, very clear that you can never, ever, ever blame a victim for sexual abuse.

Never.

It doesn't matter what a girl is wearing.

It doesn't, none of that, is asking for violence, never, but blaming the media for, influencing that as a whole different issue.

To my mind, it's very difficult to prove causality as you say.

It's not that everyone who watches violent media will immediately run out and commit a rape.

That's not gonna happen.

But my argument in the book is that violent media, especially because we see so much media in which sex and violence are completely linked to each other, for example, in some video games, many violent video games in which the women are very scantily clad or they're presented as sex workers, strippers or something, and then there's violence that happens.

It's not necessarily aimed at the women, although sometimes it is, but it happens in conjunction, so that arousal and violence are really connected.

It creates an atmosphere where it becomes more acceptable.

It creates an atmosphere where we're used to tying those things together.

And we're also seeing, a rise in teen dating violence, there are statistics on that.

And also if you look at, for example, this recent rape case in Ohio, where an awful lot of the rape itself was disseminated on social media, the boys tweeted about it, someone took a cell phone video of it.

And so you can see the mediation of, violence is becoming a really common part of our society.

- So that actually is an even stronger argument for getting involved in making sure that social experiences are, if not always moderated, because that might not be appropriate at every age.

At least there are adults paying attention, right?

- [Rebecca] Absolutely.

- We actually have a question that we reached out on our social networking sites and asked parents and educators, what did they want to learn from our experts tonight?

And this is a question that we got on Facebook.

Cyber bullying.

Can you talk about prevention as well as the effective methods for handling it when it does happen?

What about ways to empower girls?

And as a mom of boys, I'll reach out and say and ways to empower boys.

- I think that one of the things that is easy to kind of translate from real world experience to cyber bullying experiences is that notion of intervention.

If a bullying attack goes unstopped, it will continue and escalate and can actually then bring itself into the real world.

So the same kind of rules of thumb that we teach our kids about bullying in real life apply directly to cyber bullying in the cyber world.

And that's simply if you're witnessing it, step in and say that it's unacceptable.

Block that person so that you can relieve yourself of-- - Diminish their voice, right?

In some ways that's better than what you can do in real life.

- Absolutely.

And that's exactly the point.

The idea that cyber bullying does happen and that it has happened in such a severe degree, points to the need for people to be more in a community of support, empowerment, versus allowing the bad guys to have the loudest voice.

- I think that's really important.

And another thing that the parents and teachers and guidance counselors can do is shine a light on it.

There's a new book out called "Sticks and Stones", by Emily Bazelon which is about bullying and cyber bullying in particular.

And she recounts an incident where a guidance counselor, became aware of cyber bullying happening and was friends with some of the kids who were doing it on Facebook and just sort of showed up there just so that, they were aware.

- Hey guys, what are you talking about.

- Right, so they were aware that somebody was sort of.

aware of what was going on.

- When I speak with middle schoolers about online interactions.

I always ask them, before you hit send or click enter, could you picture what you're about to write blown up real big and stuck in the hallway at school?

Is it okay with you for everybody to read it.

And that idea of accountability to people we're gonna see face to face, definitely gives people pause, but are there ways, you said we're leaving our kids on the playground, we're going to the coffee shop next door.

But I gotta say that a lot of parents feel like my kids are more fluent in tech than I am.

So how can I get involved in a way where I really have any idea what's going on besides just watching what they post, if they're on Facebook?

- Well, and I also think that, if we all together today go home and friend our kids and ask our brothers and sisters or siblings, our aunts, and our uncles to all friend our kids on our social media outlets, our neighbors, all of a sudden, exactly to your point, you have this community of empowerment and also rules.

I do think that is like the wild wild west, again, that there aren't these speed limits.

While we're the sheriffs but we're also understanding now the implications of what happens when things go wrong.

And we don't have the social norms in place, yet for social media, but they're emerging.

You can tell when social media first came out, who were the first people on the scene, the more provocative sites were were more prevalent, but as you're seeing them get weeded and weeded away, the more quality content providers are on the scene and we're getting more rich and rich experiences, it'll only get better, especially as we demand it as consumers.

- I might also mention that, real life matters too, that if you have open lines of communication with your kids outside of social media, then they're gonna talk, - It's gonna help.

- Yeah, it's gonna help.

Absolutely.

- We have a question from the gentleman in the audience.

- Yes, my name is Rocco Konjestano and I'm a counselor, mentor for young youth and young adults.

As a father with two adult daughters now, and I very much agree that when they were young, the influence of letting them understand the social media and also the advertisements all about, selling and making that point.

My question is though, is what do I do with the late father.

The father who's now his daughter's a 13, 14 and never started at age five and says, Hey, hun, this is what's real and what's not real.

How can I advise them to get involved with their lives and have them make the difference and change that?

- How can you start in the middle with this conversation?

- I think it's never too late.

I mean, I think it's always, just vitally important to just open up lines of communication with your kids.

Actually, there might be a lot of really interesting opportunities when kids are older because teen media, well, there are studies that show that the, amount of explicit sexual content in teen media has increased dramatically over the past 20 years, which might not necessarily in and of itself be bad, but they say only one half of 1% of that is about sexual health.

So they're not getting any sorts of, useful messages about how to navigate the creative world, So I think even just, sort of talking about some of the images that you see, maybe expressing sort of your point of view without being too judgemental about it or being critical, those things can help a lot.

- So we care very much about the images our girls are seeing and about the relationships that they're having.

And when we come back, we're gonna talk about how media images, impact girls goals and the decisions that they make and how we can empower girls, giving them strategies that will help them resist all this pressure.

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(upbeat music) - We know that women are underrepresented in critical careers, like law, technology, engineering politics and surprisingly, still don't have many positive on-screen role models.

Jennifer Stancil, executive director of educational partnerships at WQED, says we have to encourage girls to pursue non-traditional careers, and she has some great ideas about how media can help us.

Jen, thank you very much for joining us.

- Delighted to be here.

So what is it that girls are learning from media about what they can become?

- Well, that's a terrific question.

We saw in the images throughout this whole show, how much authority those images have over girls.

The good news is that Facebook, parents, songs, they all have that authority too.

So we need to understand when that authority reduces, the kind of footprint that girls have, in terms of what they think they can do or escalates it and empowers them.

- Okay, so you're saying that we can choose to give them messages that kinda narrow what they think their options are or open them right up?

- Sure, I mean, I think archetypes are very prevalent in the media.

And so we know kind of what kind of, women we're used to seeing in television and movies.

We know that the 250 or so blockbusters that were out last year had mainly male characters, in influence position.

So that means government politics, in not only in the media themselves, but also in, major decision-making positions.

So when you see that, but all you see is images of girls that have to be skinnier and more perfect.

You don't equate the two.

You don't see a girl taking on, those big roles.

- So you don't see girls who are saying, oh, okay I see that I can be anything I wanna be.

There's an author that I know you admire that I admire very much Rachel Simmons, she wrote "Odd Girl Out" and "Curse of The Good Girl".

Will you talk a little bit about "Curse of The Good Girl", and what girls think they're supposed to aim for?

- Sure.

I heard it expressed in the audience even tonight when girls are referring back to how other girls in their class either make certain things happen.

They have to be perfect.

They have to look a certain way or they bake more makeup.

That same thing happens psychologically to them.

So that in essence, I know that girls pretend be dumb, they don't want to express themselves in class, because that's a bad thing.

They lessen their footprint in essence.

They curl up, not sort of become bold.

And so when we see girls, when we want girls to think about what being a good girl or a bad girl is, actually Rachel tells us, that good girls by definition of girls themselves, are perfect, follow directions, have a boyfriend and are usually blonde.

- Oh, okay.

Those might not be the things we want-- - But, a bad girl in our archetype is a girl who is bold, takes risks, is proud, can be a little bit boisterous.

- You're saying I'm sitting up here with three bad girls.

- I think so, I think so.

And that's a good thing.

And I'll high five the whole audience.

So I think that, when you talk about, when we talked about the girls self-esteem peaking at age nine, we're also seeing that what she considers herself to be, is being diminished by these messages.

- Actually, if I could pick up on something that Jen just said, I did an analysis of teen magazines, and what if everyone knows this, all of the, images of young women who were on the covers of those magazines are inevitably entertainers.

They're always actresses or singers.

You never see a young scientist, you never see a young writer, you never even see an athlete.

- But I'm trying to picture of that in my head.

- And there's no reason why they couldn't, but they don't.

- Well certainly now at a time when there are more female girl athletes in the history of sports right now, and we're not celebrating enough.

We don't lift up our female athletes and put them on the cover.

Yeah youth athletes.

It's amazing.

It's an amazing time, and it could be.

It could be, there's an opportunity there to build that dialogue, to build those communities and celebrate these amazing role models, right within our midst.

- And right now we're at the, crux of title, nine's almost 41st anniversary.

- [Dr Debbie] So explain title nine for us.

- So title nine is a federal law that says that girls, that you cannot be discriminated in education based on your gender.

So it has applied to sports, right?

We know that title IX has exploded, exactly right?

So a thousand percent more in 41 years, we've grown the girls.

What do we see?

We see images of Mia Hamm and her strength.

All of those things are positive images of girls.

What happens if we apply that same sort of sense of equity, that same level playing field to the way girls are contributing to the world, whether they're engineers, whether they're firefighters, how can we show girls what they can be?

- Make title nine about all of education and not only sports education.

We have a question to take from the audience.

- Whenever there are negative images of girls that affect their lives and negatively affect them, and they're non-profitable, why do people keep them up when they're affecting people inside and outside?

- So it's a really good question, right?

You're saying you guys are talking about this problem, why does it happen?

If it's not profitable, why does it happen?

- It is profitable.

It's hugely profitable.

That is the only reason why these images persist, because it's all about promoting certain aspects of the commercial industry, right?

It's about promoting films, promoting, song releases, promoting, and again, promoting all the products that are tied to achieving that particular look as I said before, the cosmetics, the diet aids, the exercise equipment, the fashions, right?

I mean, these are multi-billion dollar industries, excuse me that are, generating revenues for all of these companies.

And so it's hugely profitable.

- And it's strange too, if I can jump on that question as well, because we know there's a, store Abercrombie and Fitch that introduced a pushup bikini for seven year olds.

There was a lot of negative out lash.

Social media blew up.

They pulled the bikinis off the shelf.

- 'Cause then they stopped making money, and they started costing the store money, right?

- Actually I think though that it was a ploy because they're back on the shelves again.

At Itwixie we did a little survey.

We asked girls, what kind of bathing suits do you want to wear?

And we gave them the, we didn't talk about specifically pushup bikini tops, but we did talk about looking like an older teenager, brightly colored or a bathing suit that wouldn't fall off when you jump in the water.

Guess which one got 80% of the votes?

The one that doesn't fall off, when you jump into the water.

- Good, that's really encouraging.

- And the second place winner was the brightly colored bathing suit.

Nobody wanted to look like an older teenager.

It's not even what the girls wanted.

- And actually, if I can directly respond, one of the things that you can do as a young person, is you can control the media message.

This is now in your hands.

It didn't use to be when I was growing up, right?

There were four networks, goodness gracious and PBS, but now you have Facebook, Twitter, and I know there are girls under 13 on Facebook and Twitter, but those are yours to use as your tool, to tell the narrative and to tell the story, that you think is better.

- So, Jen, let me ask you as a parent, are there things in the media that I should be instead of just thinking of what am I gonna shield my kids from?

What should I be seeking out?

Is there anybody who's got some positive ways for my kids to interact?

- Absolutely.

- [Dr Debbie] In addition to Itwixie?

- Absolutely.

I love the research coming out of the Geena Davis media Institute.

So that's a great place to continue to get resources.

I love Common Sense Media and they're wonderful, wonderful age appropriate.

And they have tremendous girl resources.

New moon magazine is a fabulous print publication.

Terrific, terrific magazine that really is about girls expressing their own voice, and of course we have Girl Scouts.

Girl Scouts has been a juggernaut in terms of media literacy for girls.

And they have done campaign after campaign, about what girls can be and how they can be savvy about the media.

The girl Scouts recently celebrated their 100th anniversary and they clearly have been talking about leadership and great ideas for a very long time.

And as we heard earlier from Jocelyn, and she was talking about teaching younger girls.

So near peer mentoring that she was doing to talk about, what are you seeing?

What is beauty really look like?

And we are really lucky tonight to have with us Nancy Irwin.

Ms. Erwin is the director of communications and marketing for Girl Scouts of Western Pennsylvania.

And they're doing something really exciting.

We think about girl Scouts, I think in terms of the badges you can earn and the things you can learn.

But what is it Ms. Erwin that you're doing, that is really empowering girls about the media messages they're seeing.

- We have a set of materials that are available to all girls, whether they're in Girl Scouts, whether they're in a troop or they're not in a troop and it's called it's your story, tell it.

So it's relevant to girls ages five to 17 and a main component of that is media literacy.

So for younger girls, we talk about marketing tactics, we talk about ways the girls are stereotyped.

And then as they grow older, we talk about the relationships between girls and women and how girls or women are portrayed in the media.

And then finally, we talk about advocacy, that this isn't how it has to be, and that they have the power to make the change via social media.

And by contacting the people who are making these decisions.

- So really you're saying start as young as five and have this conversation in developmentally appropriate way all the way up.

- Absolutely, and one of the things that's great about girl scouting is, it's progressive learning.

So those same things that girls are learning as a Daisy girl scout as a kindergarten or a first grade, they're learning again about we're reinforcing this over and over throughout the years, in a way that's relevant to their age level.

- That's really excellent and very encouraging.

We have another question from the audience.

- I know from being a social media user, that people get cyber-bullied on it and that you can make comments on photos, and I've seen people that have made rude or cruel comments on people's photos.

And it's been talked about at school and things like that.

And I was wondering how people like outsiders would respond to that.

- It's really interesting idea, right?

That taking the criticism that we have now of these media images that we saw early in the show and the social media interactions, and putting them together to make people feel even worse.

- I think that's a definitely a question that you should take for sure.

- I think that there are a couple of good points, I think to what you're asking.

And one is that you're obviously critically enjoying your media experience.

You're obviously understanding what's appropriate and what's not, and a lot of people aren't.

And so that's why they're saying these inappropriate things on photos.

We have a thing in this country called freedom of speech.

So when you sign up for a site that's not moderated, some of this can take place.

And as these rules, these social norms are starting to fill in and teach ourselves online, what is appropriate and what's not, it's gonna continue.

But there's no reason why we can't speak out when we see inappropriate comments like that and say, that was rude.

Please stop.

You can say, I absolutely disagree and I applaud this work, and if you're gonna be very rude, you really ought not comment that way.

It's not helpful.

There are a lot of ways that in those social media spaces that you can speak out for the right point of view.

- Positive peer pressure.

- Positive peer pressure is an amazing thing.

But I do think it's going to be changing, and I think as all of us are intolerant of that kind of negativity, it will go away.

- So speaking of the positive power of change of social media, we're gonna go to another Facebook question that we got this time from a father.

So this dad, Adam, he wanted to know, I wanna have this conversation with my boys, right?

About this effect of the media on girls.

And I wanna make my boys supportive and because I'm up here, I get to add that, I wanna know not just how can I make them supportive, but how can I make them realistic and genuine in what they expect from girls relationships, with each others and their friendships with girls?

- Sure, the conversation about the influence of media doesn't stop with girls.

It is about boys.

It is about what boys see.

It is about how boys are portrayed too.

So we need to know that being critical of the media and actually using it to impart our own ideas, positive ideas is one way that we can combat all the negative things that are happening right now.

- Yeah.

I would say the same thing.

Just engage boys and girls in these kinds of conversations and really talk to boys about the impressions of girls that they're getting, because boys are getting all the same messages about girls that girls are getting that they're eye candy, that they're sex objects.

That they're-- - And they turn around and reinforce those ideas, to girls, right?

- It's think it's even more complicated because boys are getting this message that girls like it, that girls are out to enjoy these kinds of topics.

They're out to enjoy that kind of engagement and that they are looking for the boys to treat them like these objects that are being treated in that way in the movies.

And boys are being told that they should like it too.

If you talk to kids, they'll tell you they don't, they're uncomfortable.

Watch a 10 year old boy, watch a kissing scene, and you will see in an instant how uncomfortable that scene makes him.

And that tells you reams of data that you don't even need to study to know, these are the conversations, yes, we have to have with our kids.

And we have to stop thinking it's cute, that our kids are dating when they're three.

We need to support friendships and empower our boys and girls to act like kids.

That's an enjoyable, not watching our kids hold hands and maybe they'll kiss if they're seven, is that really-- - Or kiss the YouTube video, 'cause it'll be so cute.

- Exactly, it's a sensationalistic kind of time that we live in and we're making it so.

So if we start sensationalizing the good stuff and the really awesome healthy stuff, that would help our kids also emulate it and perpetuate it.

- And Jen I really liked some of the resources that you gave us earlier.

We don't have to find all these words ourselves.

As a matter of fact, the girl Scouts are sending really great messages to our girls and they have some suggestions for us as well.

Let's check it out.

- I'm a celebrity.

- I'm a celebrity.

- If I told you to do something.

- You'd do it right?

- If you wanna be cool that is.

- If you wanna be popular.

- If you wanna be popular.

- If you wanna be hot.

- If I told you to dress like me, talk like me, would you?

- You'd do it right?

- You wouldn't believe me just because I'm famous.

- Because I'm an actress.

- Because I'm a singer.

- Because I play a person on TV.

- No one should tell us how we should look.

- Pay attention to the way.

- Women and girls are portrayed in the media.

- I'm a celebrity, so do what I say.

- Watch what you watch.

- Watch what you watch.

- So I love that idea that they're expressing their watch, what you watch, right?

And it's not to say don't watch it.

It's to say, be aware of it.

So we're about to wrap our show in a conversation that could go on for so much longer, I think, with so many great ideas.

Could you each give us just one thing that you hope that parents and educators, people who influence kids, could take from this conversation tonight?

- Sure I think the thing for me is you can be the influencer, right?

You don't have to leave it back to other people to influence what media you have.

You are it, you can be writing better lyrics, you can be making games that include girls and are programmed by girls.

You can be an engineer and you can put yourself on Facebook as an engineer in training.

You can take the power that the media gives you and change the messages.

- That's really an empowering idea that we could take what, we're looking at and then create what we're looking at, offer other options.

- Absolutely, never unprecedented.

That's what the 21st century does for us.

- That's good news, Rebecca.

- I would like all of us to go home and into our communities with this simple, simple notion, that as we see girls in our lives doing something, our first response, or the first time we see them in that day, we say, wow, you're bold.

Wow, you're acting like a leader.

Wow you really worked hard to achieve whatever you just achieved and stop telling our girls, they're beautiful.

Yes, they're beautiful.

But while they are leaders, they're bold, they're athletes and they're doing amazing things.

And that helps inherently build their self esteem and we can do it.

- Yeah.

I would agree with everything that they just said as well, as I think for parents, may be a big and other caring adults in girls' lives, the big takeaway would be encouraged girls and boys, to be critical media consumers, and not just passive audience members to really, to analyze, to confront, to challenge, to question, to think about what they're seeing.

And I also want to say that all of my own research indicates that adults, parents in particular, but all adults who are involved in children's lives are enormously influential, even when you think they're not listening to you, they are.

- It's true.

What I take away from this as a doctor and as a mom is really two things.

One is that we have to be intentional as parents, not every single ad we see, or every single media we interact with.

But if we see something that gives us pause, we need to say that out loud.

We need to say to our kids, hey, wait a minute, ask a question.

What are they trying to sell here?

What have they changed?

What's real about this and what isn't.

And then the other thing that we need to do as parents is be intentional in the compliments that we give our kids.

To stop focusing on looks and grades, and focus on the journey, the things that we've been so proud of our children for doing and trying and being, since they were tiny, those things are still in there, and they need to know that we value their bravery, adventurousness, empathy, curiosity, so much more than anything that they could do with the exterior of their bodies.

If we can give our kids any of these messages, I think that we can take the opportunities that the 21st century and all this media presents us with, and create really empowered, active people.

- [Rebecca] Absolutely.

- We've talked about so many issues that affect girls today, and there are a lot of great resources available to help us as parents, to foster healthy self images for our daughters and our sons.

Common Sense Media is dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing trustworthy information, education, and the independent voice that's needed to thrive in a world of media and technology.

Their website, lets parents know what to watch out for and then what to seek out in our media rich world.

And they offer some really great advice about how to talk to girls about body images.

Let's watch this.

- [Announcer] First, give her a reality check.

Remind her that stars look the way they do, thanks to Photoshop, makeup artists, stylists, strict diets, and tons of exercise.

And most of the images they see are created by advertisers who play on the consumer's insecurities to sell a product.

- [Instructor] Use it to show the world how you feel.

- [Announcer] Next, redefine beauty.

Remind her that true beauty is not just skin deep.

Focus on other important values, achievements and qualities.

Encourage your daughter to celebrate her unique beauty and not one borrowed from somebody else.

And finally, set an example.

Monitor your own comments about appearance.

It will be a lot easier for your kids to resist media messages if you don't succumb to them.

- In addition to all of these incredible tips from experts and the great questions that we've had on social media tonight, as well as from our audience, we would like to give a teenage girl the last word on this really important topic.

And so I've asked you to come up and speak, and I'm gonna surprise you a little bit just by asking if you could tell parents and educators, the adults in teen girls lives, one message that you want them to hear to fix some of the problems we've talked about.

What would you tell us?

- I would say that parents shouldn't be anyone or do anything that they would be uncomfortable seeing their child grow up to be or do.

- So in addition to us watching what you're doing on social media sites, are you saying that teens are also watching what we're doing on social media site?

- Yeah, totally.

Because if they see their parent, like for example, swear on the internet, then since they look up to their parents as their main role model, then they'll see that it's okay and then they'll start doing it.

And so at the end of the day, parents are kids biggest role models.

- Thank you very much for your time.

You can also visit our website at https://www.wqed.org/smartparent for additional information on this topic or to share your experiences.

Thank you for joining us, for this episode of IQ smartparent.

(audience applauding)