November 23, 2010
Blurb
Oliver Tracy showed up for his first-grade portrait with a crisp white shirt tucked into navy slacks, a striped tie slightly too long for his tiny frame, and not a lock of his sun-streaked blond hair out of place…Glossing over lasting disfigurements might not be a bad thing, said Dr. Bradley S. Peterson, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
“There are kids who have some substantial socially stigmatizing features that they want to tone down,” Dr. Peterson said. Doing so in a photograph can build confidence, he said.
But parents who choose to edit also run the risk of “potentially validating the concerns that it is not O.K. to be that way,” Dr. Peterson said.
“In some ways,” he said, “even though they’re trying to help the child’s confidence, it could inadvertently undermine it.”
Read more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/nyregion/20retouch.html
“There are kids who have some substantial socially stigmatizing features that they want to tone down,” Dr. Peterson said. Doing so in a photograph can build confidence, he said.
But parents who choose to edit also run the risk of “potentially validating the concerns that it is not O.K. to be that way,” Dr. Peterson said.
“In some ways,” he said, “even though they’re trying to help the child’s confidence, it could inadvertently undermine it.”
Read more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/nyregion/20retouch.html