February 09, 2024
BMI, body dissatisfaction and depression: positive steps forward
We know that more adolescents are experiencing depressive symptoms than in the past, but we don’t yet know precisely why. Noting a need to understand modifiable risk factors for depression, which could inform future preventative work, our researcher of the month, Dr Francesca Solmi, and her team, have recently published new and novel findings about the impact of high BMI and body dissatisfaction on children’s later mental health. They “found strong longitudinal evidence that a high BMI in childhood is linked with an increased risk of depressive symptoms multiple years later” and discovered that body dissatisfaction accounts for a significant proportion of this link, finding strong evidence that being unhappy with one’s appearance at the age of 11 is linked with increased depressive symptoms during the teen years.
Summary
Body dissatisfaction refers to a person’s negative feelings towards their body as a result of a discrepancy between their perception of their body and the body that they would like to have. Their body does not match their desired appearance and this mismatch creates a sense of unease and unhappiness. Body dissatisfaction can be related to different aspects of body image. People may have concerns about their height, skin, hair. In many cases, this unease focuses on concerns with weight and shape.
The study used data from the Millennium Cohort Study, an ongoing nationally representative longitudinal birth cohort study that recruited 18,552 families with a child born between 1st September 2000 and 11th January 2002 in the UK. The young people in the study have been followed up at regular intervals, and both they and their parents have been asked various questions about their lives, thoughts and behaviours. Examining data from 13,135 children, the researchers used a measurement of BMI taken when they were seven, a measurement of depression which young people completed themselves at the age of 14, and data on body dissatisfaction which was gathered at age 11. Children were asked, ‘How satisfied are you with the way that you look?’ and they answered on a scale of 0-6.
The researchers found that high BMI at age seven was linked with increased depressive symptoms (including low mood, loss of pleasure and poor concentration) by age 14, as well as with greater body dissatisfaction at age 11. The researchers found that about 40% of the association between higher BMI and depression was explained by the fact that the children with higher BMI at seven years of age, experienced greater body dissatisfaction at some point between the BMI measurement and the measurement of depressive symptoms at the age of 14. All of these associations were twice as large in girls compared to boys.
Weight and shape concerns are more common in younger people with higher BMI. It is thought that, in the context of people with higher weights, body dissatisfaction often stems from the internalisation of stigmatising beliefs and societal attitudes towards people with higher weights and the notion that being slimmer is preferable.
The findings suggest that any efforts to reduce weight in childhood need to consider their potential mental health impacts, in order to avoid stigmatising weight and increasing body dissatisfaction, and instead support children’s mental health and wellbeing.
Implications
“Reducing body dissatisfaction in young people could be an important way of preventing depression, particularly in girls, at ages when social environments and peer relations become increasingly impactful.” Implications for parents: We should consider doing everything possible to decrease the likelihood of a young person with a high BMI developing body dissatisfaction. This may have a protective impact on their mental health during the teen years. Talk about what bodies can do, not just what they look like. Research shows that focusing on the functionality of your own body and of your child’s, rather than appearance, leads to a higher level of physical resilience and a more positive body image. This encourages young people to value how their body helps them to achieve physical tasks, not just its aesthetics. Avoid negative talk about your own body. Try not to let your child hear you say things like, “I hate my tummy”, “I look so fat today” or, “Look at my wobbly thighs”. If you do have these thoughts, try to reject them and consciously notice the parts of your body that you do like. We want our children to like their bodies, so try not to disparage your own. Promote body gratitude. Recent studies show that expressing gratitude for the ways that our bodies serve us can improve body image. Encouraging your children to note down the things that they like about their bodies can help to counter the pervasive messages that we are all exposed to about fixing and improving our bodies. Make sure that your child understands that it is not big-headed or vain to like things about their body or to care about how they look. Give your child compliments that are not appearance-related. Talk about their kindness, their lovely manners, and all of their other wonderful qualities, attributes, attitudes and skills. Tackle teasing. Teasing about appearance and weight can be hugely detrimental to positive body image and to young people’s relationship with food. Try to have open conversations with your children about their relationships with friends. Make sure they know that teasing is not acceptable. If they are being teased, talk through strategies for dealing with this. Implications for schools: Carefully consider curriculum content and whole school campaigns about ‘being healthy’. Ensure that any messaging around fitness and healthy eating is evaluated through a body image lens before implementation.
Dr Francesca Solmi
Principal Research Fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London.
Dr Francesca Solmi is a Principal Research Fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at UCL. She is an epidemiologist by background and her research mostly focuses on understanding risk factors for eating disorders in young people and the role of body dissatisfaction in causing adolescent mental health difficulties. She is currently leading a programme of research trying to understand if and how some environmental risk factors, such as schools and social media, can contribute to body dissatisfaction and eating disorder risk in young people, so that we can develop preventative interventions to improve mental health in adolescents.
Dr Francesca Solmi
Principal Research Fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London.
Scroll our research gallery
Nov 14, 2024
Delivering effective menstrual education
Research has shown that menstruation and menstrual cycle symptoms can be disruptive and detrimental to physical, mental and social wellbeing. As many as 93% of teen girls experience dysmenorrhea (severe cramps) and girls with a typical cycle experience 11 menstrual cycle-related symptoms on average, potentially including mood changes, stomach cramps and increased levels of anxiety and fatigue. Adolescents with problematic symptoms have reported a negative impact on school attendance, behaviour, confidence around peers and participation in physical activity. In the United Kingdom, evidence suggests that menstrual health education delivered by teachers generally focuses on menstrual cycle biology, as opposed to management of menstruation and menstrual cycle related symptoms. Our latest researcher of the month, Dr Natalie Brown, set out to understand young people’s perceptions of menstrual education in schools and their experiences of menstruating whilst at school, including within physical education. Her study involved nine focus groups with 10-15 year old female pupils attending primary and secondary schools across England and Wales. Pupils highlighted that, in their experience, menstrual education is limited and noted that the menstrual cycle impacts negatively on their school experience, affecting participation in sport and school attendance generally. Participants highlighted a need for more support and information regarding understanding and managing periods in school.
Oct 17, 2024
How influential is social media on young people's mental health?
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Sep 16, 2024
How do young children’s relationships with parents and teachers impact their adjustment to school?
We already know that children's relationships with their parents and teachers contribute to their school adjustment and achievement, and that positive, close relationships with adults are really important for a wide variety of children’s outcomes. However, few studies have examined interactions between these relationships or sought to address the nuances of children’s experiences in terms of how different relationships have different impact or influence. To address this, along with colleagues, our new Researcher of the Month, Dr Caoimhe Dempsey, has recently published an article which aims to examine the links between children's relationships with their mothers, fathers and teachers, and three domains of school adjustment: academic achievement, academic self-concept and behavioural adjustment in the classroom. By examining a range of data, the researchers sought to find out whether some children are more susceptible to the effects of the quality of their relationship with their teacher.
Aug 19, 2024
Supporting children's transition to secondary school
Supporting children to successfully transition from primary to secondary or senior school is vitally important. It's a big life change, which can leave both parents and children feeling excited and nervous in equal measure. At Tooled Up, we often use the analogy of a journey for the transitional experience. In fact, anyone who has attended or watched a talk with our founder, Dr Kathy Weston, is likely to have heard her say that we'd all want our children to be well prepared for any journey they go on, and that, as loving parents and carers, we wouldn't dream of sending them off on any journey without the right equipment, mindset and strategies to reach their destination safely and securely. Transition to a new school is no different. Research shows that there are numerous holistic protective factors that can help to ease transition. Conversely, it's also the case that problems with successfully transitioning to secondary school and subsequent lower levels of school connectedness are associated with lower education outcomes, school drop-out, higher levels of depression and anxiety, and increased involvement in criminal, violent and antisocial behaviour. Research also shows that these difficulties may not be equal across different socio-demographic variables, with children from underserved communities (including those from minority ethnic backgrounds and lower socio-economic status) and children with behavioural difficulties facing greater challenges during the transition to secondary school. It's therefore important for all parents and educators to consider how to make this transition as seamless as possible. Along with her co-authors, our Researcher of the Month, Dr Aurelie Lange, has published a new paper which evaluates the efficacy of a new UK-based online intervention called Level Up. In it, Dr Lange seeks to explore families' experiences of facilitators and barriers to engagement and change.
Jul 15, 2024
The impact of digital experiences on teens with mental health vulnerabilities
Over the last decade, digital developments have led to major changes in the ways that teens learn, work, play and interact with others. Digital access is a daily reality for most children and young people. Nine in 10 children in the UK now own a smartphone by the time they reach the age of 11, and the large majority of children aged 11 now use social media (78%) and have a social media profile (72%), despite being younger than the minimum age requirement for many platforms. By the time teens are 17 years old, 97% will use social media. Coincident with this change, adolescent mental health problems have also increased in prevalence. It is therefore no surprise that much research has focused on the relationship between digital experiences and adolescent mental health. However, comparatively few studies have directly compared the experiences of teens with mental health conditions meaning that some key questions remain unanswered. Do adolescents with pre‐existing mental health conditions differ in terms of why and how they engage with the digital world compared to peers without such difficulties? Are specific mental health conditions linked to different patterns of digital usage? What role do such differences play in the development and escalation of these conditions? In a recent paper, our Researcher of the Month, Dr Kasia Kostyrka-Allchorne, and her colleagues, explore what the evidence shows about the digital experiences of teens with mental health vulnerabilities.
Jun 13, 2024
NELI Preschool: a new oral language enrichment programme for preschools and nurseries
Oral language skills provide the foundation for formal education, yet many children enter school with language weaknesses. Oral language is fundamental to children’s overall development and educational success. It is linked to all higher level cognitive skills and is pivotal for literacy development, and education more generally. It’s also vitally important for children’s social and emotional development. The term oral language refers to a complex set of skills that should ideally work seamlessly together to enable children to communicate with others by producing and understanding language. It’s an umbrella term, encompassing numerous component skills which include having a good vocabulary and the grammatical ability to combine words effectively to convey meaning, along with an understanding of cause and effect, memory skills and the ability to plan what to say and what not to say. Language skills develop rapidly between the ages of 3–6 years making preschool an excellent time to intervene to support language development. Because of this, Dr Gill West and her colleagues – as part of a team headed by Professor Charles Hulme – have developed and evaluated the efficacy of a new language enrichment programme, the Nuffield Early Language Intervention—Preschool (NELI Preschool), which is delivered to children the year before they enter formal education. The programme combines language enrichment for all children, with additional targeted support for those with language needs, potentially narrowing the gap in language skills associated with social disadvantage.
May 16, 2024
"More is more”: the impact of careers education on later outcomes
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Apr 11, 2024
STEM in preschool settings: do teachers’ scientific questions differ by child gender?
In the US, as in numerous countries including the UK, female and non-White students are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) fields. A significant body of research demonstrates significant gender disparities in STEM achievement, participation and attitudes from early childhood, and that these continue to widen as children get older. Children are strongly influenced by their early environments and conversations with adults. Whilst gendered messages around STEM are now rarely explicit – children are unlikely to be told that girls can’t be scientists – they may receive more subtle messages about representation and belonging. These differences may contribute to children’s beliefs about their own STEM ability, their performance in STEM activities, and their decision to pursue a career in STEM. US researcher, Dr Sona Kumar, and her colleagues sought to explore whether there are subtle differences in the messages that preschool educators send girls and boys about STEM. Previous, older research with caregivers found that parents tended to provide more scientific explanations to boys than to girls. Studies have also found that, within classroom settings, boys often receive more attention from teachers on science-related subjects than girls. Dr Kumar predicted that teachers would direct more scientific questions to boys than girls and tested this by observing a preschool setting.
Mar 14, 2024
Do parental controls work and what are the pros and cons?
Policymakers and technology companies promote the use of parental control tools to ensure children’s safety in our digital age. In recent years, there has been considerable industry investment in this new generation of technical child protection measures, designed to help parents and carers to control what their children see and do online. Some of these tools operate at the level of the device (such as a phone or tablet). Other tools are embedded into specific services, such as Snapchat, or streaming services such as Netflix. Others work at the level of the operating system, such as IOS, Android or Windows, or are provided by your broadband company. Control tools vary in functionality. Some allow parents to limit the amount of time that children spend on a device or particular app. Others can track their child’s location. Internet filters block certain categories of content (violence, adult content or gambling, for example), or specific websites. There are other tools that track children’s online activity (search history, online purchases or activity logs, for example) and provide reports or real-time alerts to parents. Some tools track activity and interactions on social media platforms and can limit children’s contact with unknown users. But how many families actually make use of them, and do they work? Our Researcher of the Month, Dr Mariya Stoilova, and her colleagues, reviewed all available evidence in a recently published study.
Jan 15, 2024
New study links energy drinks to mental health problems in young people
We’ve all seen the vast array of colourful cans and bottles in the supermarket. Perhaps you are a fan yourself. But did you know that, in 2020, the energy drinks market was worth $45.8 billion globally? It is a large and expanding market, projected to grow at an annual rate of 8.2%, and reach a whopping $108.40 billion by 2031. Despite the fact that these products typically contain very high levels of both caffeine and sugar, and warnings on labels that they are ‘not recommended for children’, they are extremely popular with young people. In fact, if you have offspring of a certain age, you are likely aware that 2023 was the year of Prime, a product popularised on social media. Initially, Prime was a hydration drink, but the range has since expanded to include an energy drink containing caffeine. It became so popular among teens that bottles were spotted selling for £18 in some shops (and more on resale sites), despite the recommended retail price being only £2.99. Research from a few years ago had already found that up to a third of children in the UK consume caffeinated energy drinks on a weekly basis and ranked young people in the UK as the biggest consumers of energy drinks in Europe for their age group. 13% identified as high chronic consumers – having energy drinks four to five times a week, or more. Published today (15th January), the most comprehensive evidence review to date has found that consuming energy drinks is associated with a wide range of risks, including increased risk of mental health issues among children and young people. Our researcher of the month, Professor Amelia Lake, along with co-author Dr Shelina Visram and the rest of the team at FUSE (the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health) at Teesside University and Newcastle University, examined data from 57 studies of over 1.2 million children and young people from more than 21 countries. The study’s findings build on earlier research and highlight numerous risks associated with energy drinks.