From cartoons to Instagram: “perfect pictures” impact children’s self and body image

Instagram is the realm of perfect images. Adults who access social media at a later stage in life, as well as younger people who grow up with it, know that those pictures have little to do with the analogue reality behind these idealised worlds. Nevertheless, elaborately staged and digitally edited images with which influencers reach young and very young people in particular have an impact. Often, insecurities arise in viewers which are fed by discrepancies: between one’s own appearance and that of professionally good-looking models, between real bodies and their idealised images, between the diffuse feeling of having to be perfect while experiencing failure. Of course, such moments do not only arise in the digital world. But they accumulate and intensify where the preoccupation with perfection intensifies – and a large part of the image platform Instagram has developed into a veritable stage of flawlessness. For girls and young women in particular, Instagram therefore poses risks to their self-esteem: despite all the efforts towards modernity and emancipation, appearance still seems to play a defining role for them.