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Disney Body Image

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Isn’t the monkey see monkey do behavior of children the craziest thing? Kids are highly impressionable beings, so it is understandable that people are worried that they will develop the wrong ideas from things they see. Parents have good reason to be wary of what their kids view; however, parents are now making mountains out of molehills with many things children watch. Like how there is growing concern that Disney Princesses have a negative impact on girls’ body image. While children need to learn about the unrealistic images of women in the media, not all portrayals have the same affect. To copy what they see is essential for a child’s mental growth, but what they see can be overshadowed by other elements. One of the main concerns for …show more content…
It took a while, but I managed to find a woman named Sarah Coyne, who studied the effect Disney had on young girls (Bailey). In the study with three hundred seven preschool girls, Coyne found that there was actually a positive correlation between the Disney Princess lifestyle and better body image; a correlation that ended disappearing when the same girls were tested again a year later (Bailey). Almost all the women in Disney are crazy thin, so why are things different with them than the photoshopped models on the magazine? An experiment done by Doeschka J. Anschutz and Rutger C.M.E. Engels may actually provide an explanation (Anschutz). This experiment was done in response of another experiment by Dittmar, which showed that girls who were shown images of realistically a proportioned doll, named Emme, had better body image than the girls shown images in Barbies (Anschutz). Anschutz and his partner wondered if the results would be any different if the girls actually played with the dolls so they designed an similar experiment where one young group of girls played with Emme, another group played with a Barbie, and a third played with legos and found that there was no difference in “body size discrepancy” between the three groups; in fact, the only difference was that the girls that played with the realistically proportioned doll ate more candy than the others (Anschutz). While these experiments suggest many ideas, a large one is that there is a big difference between just seeing something and actually interacting with it. If a girl sees a fashion model, all she will see is a pretty face, so that is all she can copy. If a girl sees Rapunzel, she will see a pretty face, but think about magic hair, frying pans, chameleons,

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