What Parents & Educators Need to Know about Social Pressures: Appearance

Anna Bateman
Mental health expert and former DfE adviser

Parent Guide

15 min

This free online safety guide focuses on social pressures linked to appearance. It examines a range of potential risks such as filters, 'airbrushing' and damage to self-esteem.

Social media has its benefits: connecting with friends, sharing experiences and widening users' understanding of broader issues beyond their local community. The challenge with connecting and sharing experiences via social media, however, is that these shared experiences are often conveyed mainly through images. For young people, wanting to fit in and caring about their physical appearance is a perfectly normal part of adolescence. However, with widespread easy access to image-altering software and filters, the physical appearance of a person we see online is often not the reality - further increasing the pressure for young people to gain or to portray unreal perceptions.

In this guide, you'll find tips on potential risks relating to appearance, such as filters, 'airbrushing' and damage to self-esteem.

 

Anna Bateman

With more than 24 years’ experience in education as a teacher, trainer, consultant and Interim Executive Board member, Anna Bateman has gained a fantastic understanding of pedagogy, school improvement, leadership and what works.

She is passionate about placing prevention at the heart of every school, integrating mental wellbeing within the curriculum, school culture and systems. Through this work, students have the opportunity to learn skills and techniques to cope with modern day pressures alongside their academic studies.

Over the last 10 years Anna has worked with and transformed hundreds of primary and secondary schools. She has excellent subject knowledge and a solid understanding of how schools work. This puts her in a unique position to be able to offer highly innovative and bespoke programmes to resolve specific and complex issues.

As a previous member of the advisory group for the Department of Education, advising them on their mental health green paper, Anna has operated at the forefront of new initiatives and her passion is to drive these forward to the benefit of schools, school leaders and of course pupils and students.

Moreover, she is an accredited facilitator for the Academic Resilience Approach (Young Minds), Youth Mental Health First Aid Trained as well as a licensed PATHS trainer promoting alternative thinking strategies.