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How to Counter Harmful Tween & Teen Magazines – Part One

Nancy Gruver

University of Minnesota research finds that teen girls “who frequently read magazine articles about dieting were more likely five years later [emphasis added] to practice extreme weight-loss measures … than girls who never read such articles.”.

That’s terrifying for parents, grandparents, aunts & uncles, teachers and youth workers because we know most girls will read those magazines at some point. What to do? Here’s Part One of how you can counter their harmful influence.

  • If she’s not a tween yet, decide ahead of time at what age you will allow her to read which magazines.
  • Try to avoid censorship, which makes the magazines “forbidden fruit” she reads in secret—where you can’t discuss them with her.
  • Read her magazines yourself (yes, this is excruciatingly painful to do, but it’s crucial) so you can converse casually (not lecture her!) about them.
  • Look critically at the magazines you read (both the articles and the ads). Do they objectify females or reduce them to body parts? How would you feel if it was your daughter in those photographs/stories?
  • Do your magazines make you judge your body? Do they make you crave certain clothes, cars, products, etc? Look for the parallels in her magazines.
  • Ask your daughter to identify her favorite article and ad in each issue. Listen for her underlying emotional need and think about other ways you can help her meet that need. Is she concerned about her body? Is she worried about fitting in or getting male attention?
  • Provide positive attention for ALL of who she is and she’ll have less desire for “appearance-only” attention from others.

To be continued tomorrow with Part Two ….

14 thoughts on How to Counter Harmful Tween & Teen Magazines – Part One

  1. This is interesting to me because I of course read teen magazines as a kid – my I can’t even remember their names now, weird – but I tended to skip the dieting articles. I was much more interested in the “confessions” and love and relationship articles. I wonder how they divided out which ARTICLES the kids are reading, as opposed to which MAGAZINES the kids are reading.

  2. Another tip I would add — have your daughter subscribe to New Moon Magazine – a feminist magazine for girls 8 to 12 started by a mom so her daughter’s had something positive to read. As she gets older, share your copies of Ms and Bitch with her!

  3. Professor What If,
    I was just about to suggest New Moon, myself! Trouble is, that’s the only magazine or similar resource that I can come up with. Girl’s Life and so on are fashion saturated, American Girl is consumption oriented, and JUMP is defunct. What a shame.

  4. No doubt about the negative effect on body perception many publications (particularly in their advertising) have, and thanks for the excellent suggestions on addressing the issue. I do wonder, though, if this research cites the dieting articles as the cause of this issue – or if it’s more of a parallel. IE maybe the drive that draws a girl to read up on dieting at age 11 is the same cause of “extreme weight-loss measures” at age 16. In this case, the magazines function as a red flag for a pre-existing issue, not so much the root of it.

    In Jr. High school my favorite “women’s” mag was Jane Pratt’s Sassy. Does anyone remember if that was as empowering as I thought it was?

  5. American Girl was the only girl’s magazine I was ever interested in. (I mean, I read my sister’s “Teen” magazines but only for the reader submitted “Why Me” stories.) Don’t know what “consumption oriented” means- unless it turned into a catalog for American Girl dolls since the last time I read it in the early 90’s.

    If these are younger kids (like, younger than tween), subscribe them to magazines that aren’t gender specific. This may sound silly, but I credit most of my reality based think and reading interest to magazines like Zoobooks and Ranger Rick. Voracious reading + critical thinking = greater resistance to groupthink and cultural goofiness later on.

  6. LargeMarge: I’m not big into magazines and never have been (I used to read Time when I was younger and now read Popular Science and Scientific America, because I’m a dork/nerd lol), but aren’t there a lot of “handmade” ‘zines out there? I’m sure you can find a plethora of them online, and there has to be a lot of positive ones out there!

  7. this is a great post! great idea!

    and great tips…ones i will keep in mind over the next couple of years as i stare down the barrel of having a teenage girl.

  8. Stellah, I’ve always heard glowing things about Sassy, but I never really got it. Just figured out why, thanks to Wikipedia — I didn’t start reading it until it had already been sold to the publishing company that stripped it of its sass and turned it into another vapid flirt-guide. No wonder it failed to make an impression on me.

  9. …
    i don’t read magazines. at all. i’d rather buy a book.
    ‘course, i also don’t watch TV

  10. I grew up reading New Moon and American Girl. New Moon was awesome and did me a lot of good, I think. American Girl wanted me to buy a ton of crap, but they did have some fun ideas for arts and crafts and such — I think that’s where I got the idea to mummify my barbies as a kid, complete with shoebox sarcophogi and film canisters full of jelly beans to represent organs. Er, and bake cookies of various shapes, but I was a weird kid and into ancient Egypt, so I spent a lot more time on the mummification.

  11. I remember these magazines vividly. Coming from the UK, I read magazines called ‘Girl talk’ and ‘Star girl’ until I was about 11, and after that ‘Mizz’ and ‘Shout’ till I was about 15, and then the late-teens ones like ‘Bliss’ and ‘Sugar’. After I was about 16 I stopped buying them altogether, because they never covered things I was interested in. In fact, you’d think that, going up in age, they would cover more relevant topics to a real woman, but they never really did. I suppose you can’t blame them, that’s what they’re for, I guess: fluff.

    BUT! The reason I was so drawn to this post is that I remember very clearly that THESE MAGAZINES DID DAMAGE ME AS A CHILD!

    Not as a teen. I was a bit over it by then. But as a little girl, 9-11 or so. I remember, very, very succinctly, how I felt when I bought my first one. I was 9, it was ‘girl talk’, it had a pink cover with a girl holding a white toy cat on it. And I was so surprised by the contents! Until then, I’d been operating pretty much unaware of the corporate marketing to children, since I was homeschooled, and didn’t watch TV that much. My world was not really gendered. I had played rugby, and been a cubscout (I don’t know about the USA, but in the UK scouts are now unisex. Cubscouts are a pre-11 version. There is the ‘girls-only’ Brownies and Girl Guides, which are kind of like girlscouts, but a girl can also join the regular scouts) So my reaction to the magazine was one of confusion at first. First, it assumed all your friends would be female. It always refered to friends as ‘she’, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy! I thought, I must be weird for having male friends. I don’t wear make-up or paint my nails. I’m not ‘girly’ enough! So I started trying to make myself like the ideals in those magazines.

    I’ve kept my diaries from then, and even some of the magazines. I don’t know about American magazines, but the ones I read had fashion pages where clothes were advertised (as if you could buy clothes at that age!) and constantly referenced ‘shopping’ and ‘make-up’ as the two hobbies most desirable for a ten year-old girl. I remember, distinctly, this one passage from my horoscope:

    ‘Boy, your fashion sense is really sagging lately! Get yourself down town and pick up some of the latest gear.’

    (‘Gear’ not meaning drugs here, I assume, lol) This, and the fashion pages, and the fact that all the girls in these magazines had great hair, clothes and make-up, made me feel very inadequate. I never really thought about weight. That just never seemed to be an issue. It was just clothes and make-up. My mum was wiser than most, though, and I think one of the things which cured me was… dentist appointments. Mum and I would sit there reading ‘Vogue’ and ‘Marie Claire’ in the waiting rooms, laughing at the stupid adverts and the price of the clothes (‘£3,000 for a belt!!’) And we’d think of all the things you could buy for that price, like how many packets of custard creams or whatever. Looking back, my mother definitely saw that the problem was these magazines.

    The question is, would we be better off without these magazines for girls so little? Or is it a good idea to let that phase come and go?

  12. “I don’t know about the USA, but in the UK scouts are now unisex”

    I’m so jealous! As much as I loved girl scouting as a kid, I felt like the home-ec agenda was really limiting. Couldn’t we bake pies AND do all sort of fun outdoor things like the boy scouts?

  13. Yeah, we have:

    Beaver scouts: ages about 4-7
    Cubscouts: 8-11
    Scouts: 11+

    And, just for the girls, same age divisions:

    Rainbow Brownies
    Brownies
    Girl Guides

    After being a cubscout, I became a Girl Guide (They wear blue uniforms…). But, perhaps unfairly, I don’t think boys can be Brownies or Guides. We did, however, have the Guide leader’s son with us, and he joined in a lot of our activities, so he was like a Boy Guide!

    I wonder, if I’d not read those magazines, whether I’d have gone onto become a scout, instead of a guide…?

  14. Thanks for all the great comments. Here’s a link to a piece about the research study:

    Loved the recommendations of New Moon as my daughters and I are the founders ;–)

    Also loved the memories about reading (or not reading) the mags when you were a girl.

    Last but not least, I would give anything to see a photo of the mummified barbies. Now that Mattel owns American Girl, it’s really ironic that AG gave you an idea to mummify your barbies – whoo!

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