"Don't overanalyse the magic out of my little girl’s precious childhood."

WARNING: This post deals with eating disorders and “thinspiration”. It may be triggering for some people. 

My daughter is three-years-old.

She has an amber-tinged head of ringlets that she wants to grow longer like Ana’s hair in Frozen. She has just started pre-school this term, where she is learning to sit with her legs crossed like a big girl.

She clings to my leg like a sea urchin when people remark on her big eyes and long lashes. And she informed me the other day, quite casually, that she was fat.

“Mama I ate too much. Look at my big fat tummy,” she told me.

My heart went cold. She is three. The idea of a girl barely past toddler-hood being so self-aware left me stunned.

It bothered me because I know eating disorders.  It bothered me because I know the battle with food intimately. I know the torture of being hyper sensitive to every fold of flesh. I know the endurance test of bingeing and purging and the exhausting fight to exercise for hours on end.

I lived this for over a decade. Several hospital admissions, many rooms filled with voices talking, treatment, programs, behavioural therapy, mindfulness. I’ve been there.

I’m good now. But having a daughter makes you wonder how she will be. It makes you extremely cautious about how to tread in the future. I worry about how I act. I worry about how we talk about food. I worry about her perceptions of herself.

What I DON’T worry about? Is what she plays with.

I say this because a father has recently called for a major retailer to withdraw the sale of a line of dolls known as Winx dolls. Mamamia reported just yesterday that:

“Sydney father Mark Chenery has launched a campaign, along with women-focused campaigning organisation Fair Agenda, calling for Myer to remove the Winx Club dolls from its shelves, the Daily Telegraph reports.

“(W)hile shopping at Myer I came across a Winx Club doll with legs so skinny they looked like they might snap. 

“It’s hard enough trying to protect my four-year old daughter against the barrage of photo-shopped advertising she sees on billboards and the sides of buses, without underweight and over sexualised toys being marketed directly at her, in doll form,”

I am sure that this father is a loving, caring dedicated man. That his overwhelming priority is the welfare of his daughter. I do not doubt for a second that his intentions are honourable.

But I will not sign his petition.

As a former eating disorder sufferer I can’t remember for a moment thinking about Barbie as I vomited blood in the toilet of the local gym.

I don’t mean to trivialize his concerns but I think what his petition does is trivialize what eating disorders are.

I am acutely aware that eating disorders are starting at a much younger age than when I was a sufferer. But I am also acutely aware that eating disorders are not caused by a child’s fairy toy. A doll meant to be enchanting, ethereal, otherworldly.

NOT REAL.

I know that Mr Chenery is just trying to protect his daughter. But does banning a toy achieve his goal?

His daughter is going to be bombarded with images of thin women throughout her youth. She is going to be faced with skinny girls in real life, and see sexualized images of young women from peering at her from billboards, from buses, on the Internet.

Surely as a parent our role is to educate her and encourage her self-esteem. To assist our children develop their own ability to see what’s fact and fiction. To learn to be discerning about what they read and especially see.

Eating disorders are complex.

In writing this I reached out to my old therapist, a man who has treated thousands of young women with eating disorders, including me. Chris Thornton, is a clinical psychologist who has treated eating disorders for over 20 years.

He told Mamamia “Anorexia is a complicated illness the cause of which remains elusive.  There is no one thing, be it a toy or a magazine cover that causes anorexia.”

Eating disorders ARE something to be frightened of. They impact not just the person suffering but their family, their friends, their co-workers or fellow students. For Chris Thornton toys like this are not “causal of eating disorders”.

He does however add, there is evidence that “body image concerns occur in young children and media images and toys such as these ones that present unrealistic body images of women, or stereotypical or sexualised images of girls and women are unhelpful.”

Unhelpful perhaps but should they be banned? What else will we then see fit to ban? Barbie? Doctors and Nurses dress ups? Nerf guns?

As I look around my daughter’s room I see Barbies, Tinkerbells, a stuffed Dora the Explorer and a plastic box of dinosaurs. I don’t see anything sinister, anything dangerous.

I see fairies and fantasy and I make a secret wish that we don’t overanalyse too much magic out of my little girl’s precious childhood.

Do you think kids’ toys are getting too skinny? Take a look at the gallery below…