Bodily Integrity: Teaching Your Child to Make the Best Choices for His or Her Body

By Caron C. Andrews and Amanda Grossman-Scott

The body is a sacred garment. It’s your first and last garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honor. —Martha Graham

Bodily Integrity is not a term we hear every day. It’s an even harder to term to define or explain to a child, let alone understand as adults.

How do I explain to a 7 year old (who likes to run around naked) that his body is beautiful and strong and capable and that he should be proud of it– but also teach him that it’s not for everyone to see, that he should cover up certain parts of it? It’s a fine line in which shame should play NO part. So, what’s the solution?

Martha Graham (1894–1991), a renowned dancer and choreographer, said, “The body is a sacred garment. It’s your first and last garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honor.”

A more concise point about bodily integrity may never have been uttered. Except that with the influence of the media, plastic surgery and airbrushing, there has never been a point in history when the human body has been treated with such disdain and abuse.

§ Emotional Bodily Integrity: Our Culture’s obsessive need for “perfection”

Sadly, many of us have a love/hate relationship with our bodies. We need our bodies in order to live, to experience the world, to find pleasure and enjoyment, and we have definite ideas about how we want them to look, feel, and function. We want them to be “perfect”, to match ideals we see in magazines, the media, and movies.

It’s not uncommon to hear people of every gender, age, race and ethnicity express dissatisfaction or even hatred for their bodies or parts of them.

Do you know what happens when you pull apart something that is a whole? It compromises the integrity of the thing in its entirety. It’s integrity. Your bodily integrity, as well as your self-worth is damaged when you tear apart your body in an effort to achieve something that doesn’t exist: the perfect body.

And what’s incredibly sad and short-sighted about this narrow focus on looks, body type, and striving for perfection is that it disregards what else our bodies are for, and how much more they mean than fleeting beauty. It disregards our emotional bodily integrity.

Emotional bodily integrity is:

  • The personal belief that our bodies, while crucial to our understanding of who we are, do not in themselves solely define our worth
  • The sense that I esteem our bodies and we treat them accordingly and expect other people to do the same
  • The understanding that it is a privilege to interact with me—spiritually, emotionally, physically.

§ Teaching it to our kids: the importance of honoring our bodies.

Your child should understand that our bodies are with us throughout our lives and are central to how we experience the world. Her body deserves honor. How can we teach a child to honor his or her body?

  • Teach her to take care of it. We honor our bodies when we take care of them. When we fuel them with healthy foods and liquids, they function much better. Getting enough sleep for our bodies’ needs makes us more alert, engaged in, and attentive to our lives. Combine this with healthy exercise and we are at our physical best, which contributes to good emotional health. Under these nourishing conditions, we have mental energy. We feel physically better. We have the clarity and endurance to focus on the things we want to do and be in our lives. We are more emotionally balanced and reasonable.
  • Teach him not to do things that make him uncomfortable. We honor our bodies when behave in a way that is true to ourselves. We don’t do things that make us feel uncomfortable. Like participating in unhealthy relationships or sexual practices that hurt us physically or emotionally. That, as a person, I choose when I want to engage in kissing, hand holding or other physical affection.
  • Teach her to accept her body as it is! We honor our bodies when we accept them as they are, and accept the range of reasons why we have them. No one has the elusive “perfect” body—even, usually, those in the images that we think do! When we come to terms with the bodies we have, with all of their astonishing capabilities and limitations and quirks, and learn to set our limits for what we will and will not do with them and to them, we have truly learned to recognize their real importance.
  • Teach him that his body is just one part of who he is. We honor our bodies when we understand that they are one aspect of what makes us a unique person, not the only aspect. Help him to discover his talents and capabilities. Help him to build on his strengths instead of trying to “correct” his weaknesses.

When a person’s actions reflect the absolute best choices to make for themselves, when we truly seek to care for ourselves in the best way possible, we are on our way to developing bodily integrity.

Curious to learn more? Check out our books, ; How to Talk to Your Kids About Pornography, which is also available in ; and .

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Caron C. Andrews has been a contributing writer for Educate and Empower Kids since its beginnings. She received her BA in English from the University of New Mexico. In addition to her articles on healthy relationships, healthy sexuality, and combatting pornography addiction, she has copyedited medical books written for the lay reader, fantasy novels, and historical dramas. She is currently working on starting a blog and writing a novel. She is the mother of a teenage son and daughter and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Amanda Grossman-Scott is Board Vice president and Writing Coordinator for Educate and Empower Kids. She has written for magazines, newspapers and blogs and has been active in the journalism industry intermittently for the last 15 years. She studied Journalism and Communications at Utah Valley University. Amanda is from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and now lives with her husband and three children in Sacramento, California. 

 

 

 

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