The Words We Use Give Our Children Their Scripts for Life

Is this a "snack" or a "meal"?

Source: Jane Ogden

I know I am "good at being busy," "pretty organised," "like to have fun," and "good at reading road signs." This is based on very little evidence, but at some time I was told this as a child and it has stuck.

Words matter and have the power to change how we see ourselves, how we behave, and even how we experience our own bodies.

Body and Food Scripts

Much of my work over the years has focused on body image and shows us that parents who use negative "body looking" words such as "fat" or "chubby" or negative "body doing" words, such as ''a couch potato" or "lazy," may well have heard these when they were children, often use these to their own children, and often have children who say these same words about themselves.

I have also studied eating behaviour and similarly found that words such as "treat," "greedy," and "picky" can travel through the generations.

Food and body scripts can therefore be lodged into our minds by our parents, and these then get passed onto our own children as we become parents ourselves. In the process, we create generations of those with either a healthy or an unhealthy relationship with food and body size. We may think negatively about how we look and eat without quite knowing why. But so might our parents, their parents before them, and unfortunately, our own children. And so it goes on.

Our Bodies

But words can also change how we experience our own bodies. Hunger may feel like a biological process, but calling food "a snack" or a "meal" can change how much it fills us up and how much we then eat afterwards.

Likewise, conditions such as tonsillitis, gastroenteritis, or heart failure can feel different if they are referred to as "sore throat," "stomach upset," or "your heart isn’t pumping strongly enough," and how a doctor describes a patient’s polycystic ovary syndrome can change how they feel about their condition in the years to follow. Even on my run, when I call the hill a "hill" it feels much harder than when I tell myself, "It’s nearly coffee time!"

Images Matter Too

Sometimes it's not just the word that matters but also the images and the way something is framed. Having a big bandage over a wound rather than a small bandage can make the wound feel more worrying, and seeing an operation on a screen can make it more painful. Sometimes just lots of words in the form of a nice chat with a nurse during a conscious operation, such as having varicose veins removed, can make it hurt less.

Choose Your Words Wisely

In our daily lives, we chatter away, plucking words out of nowhere as we talk to those around us. But these words may well reflect the ones we heard as we were growing up, may impact those around us who are still growing up, and have the power to change how we think, what we do, and even how we feel about our bodies and who we are. Words really do matter. So choose wisely, try to break any bad patterns from the past, and create better ones for the future.