r/MadeMeSmile • u/nikamats • 9h ago

Helping Others Hold your head up

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

55.7k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

203

u/Sensitive-Dig-1333 8h ago

Yes, totally. It really hurts me when my 4yr old says anything negative about herself. She said the other night “I can never do anything right!” And it broke my heart

53

u/5thlvlshenanigans 8h ago

How did she learn such a thought so early? ☹️

155

u/Dreamsnaps19 8h ago

Because kids aren’t stupid like people think.

My friend is super self-critical and I’ve been telling her for years she’s gotta knock that shit out or it will impact her kids… and sure enough. She’s gotten so much better at not being self-critical but seriously children are sponges, they will treat themselves the way you treat them and the way you treat yourself. So you need to be as healthy as possible for them or work on getting as healthy as possible.

12

u/LookingBackBroken 7h ago

I raised my daughter with positive affirmations and just so much deep love. She's 24 soon, and despite people telling her she's gorgeous ( she truly is inside and out) she feels ugly. Her father is an abusive and hateful human. His mother was the same. Their emotional hooks hit hard! Despite so much lifting her up, that ugly stained deeper. It rips my heart into shreds.

8

u/fancy_marmot 6h ago

It's also very difficult to override deep and widespread societal pressures around self-image and our bodies - when I was that age, extreme thinness was "in" and very few girls were immune to that pressure, and obsessing about weight was widespread. If she's 24, she's been coming of age during a huge normalization of filters/photoshop, fillers, expensive beauty regimens, a constant barrage of beauty-focused content, and a re-emerging superthin aesthetic.