“There was not a single child who did not change their response after hearing their mother say something, either in the positive or negative direction,” Perez, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, told me. “The mother who said she liked her hair, the child echoed. The mother who said she didn’t like something, ditto.”

For mothers with their own appearance and body issues, having a daughter can be a difficult reckoning. The internal soundtrack of I’m fat or I need to lose weight is hard to defy. But the stakes are high for the next generation if we don’t set a good example. For a yet-to-be-published study, Perez collected data on 72 female executives to document how women’s insecurities about their looks play out in professional settings and affect their self-esteem well into adulthood. Almost half of these managerial-level women reported discomfort in socializing, and in representing their company, because they were self-conscious about how other people perceived their appearance. “We have women who have already made it to the C-suite still struggling with this issue,” Perez said.

So what’s the answer? Perez, a board member of the Academy for Eating Disorders, says she gets less traction with mothers when she talks about making changes for the sake of their own mental health and well-being than when she talks about the need to set a positive example for future generations.

But making girls feel good about themselves is a delicate matter. The internet remains fiercely divided on an age-old question: Should you tell your daughter she’s beautiful? Experts say that a constant loop of “You’re beautiful” is counterproductive. It doesn’t protect against societal messaging that conveys that girls are valued, first and foremost, for being pretty.

Moreover, there’s an element of faux empowerment in the “everyone is beautiful” movement. While the goal of wanting to broaden our beauty standards is noble, beauty is defined in part by its rarity, and it’s not everyone’s job to be beautiful, says Renee Engeln, a psychology professor at Northwestern who studies body image and the media. “If what you really mean when you call your daughter beautiful is that she is strong, smart, resilient, or funny, use those more specific adjectives instead,” she says.

What mothers do in front of their daughters likely matters even more than what they say. “I was anorexic when I was teenager, so I had some come-to-Jesus moments when I had a daughter,” says Peggy Orenstein, the author of Don’t Call Me Princess. “It was scary for me. I had to learn that it was important for my daughter to see me eat ice cream and not just have a ‘bite’ of someone else’s. I wanted my daughter to be less preoccupied with weight and food, but I needed to transcend some of my own food issues.” In practice, Orenstein says, this has meant not having scales in the house; not describing food in terms of good versus bad or fattening versus not fattening; and talking more about how foods taste and whether they leave you feeling full or not full.