They eat junk food, skip breakfast and say it’s “normal” to do so. They get less and less physical activity as they progress through their teens but still see themselves as “healthy enough.” They think they’re too heavy when the medical charts say they’re just right, or just right when they’re actually overweight. And believe it or not, they look to their mothers as prime models of behavior.

So says a new study of attitudes among contemporary girls, conducted by the Girl Scout Research Institute. Called “The New Normal? What Girls Say about Healthy Living,” it was prompted by the alarming rise since 1980 in childhood obesity, which has tripled among ages 6 to 11 and doubled for ages 12 to 19. Its findings show that girls are using a different set of norms to define “healthy living” and “normal behavior” than adults might think they do.

“There was lots of information available about the impact of childhood obesity but relatively little on girls’ attitudes on contributing factors like health, diet, weight and exercise. So that’s what the researchers decided to focus on,” said Marcia Barber, CEO of the Girl Scouts Trillium Council, which has 22,000 Scouts in nine counties of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland.

The report combined focus group research with online surveys of more than 2,000 girls ages 8 to 17, along with 600 mothers and, for comparison, 460 boys. It’s available online at www.girlscouts.org.

Among the key findings:

A Girl Scout study notes that 40 percent of girls ages 11 to 17 think they are not skilled enough to participate in sports.

l For most girls, how they look is of greater concern than what they eat or how much they exercise. About 65 percent see their lifestyle as “healthy enough,” while a third have a distorted perception of their own weight – they either think they’re too heavy when they’re really in the normal range, or think they’re normal when they weigh too much. Girls also think of health as the absence of negative behaviors – especially drug and alcohol use – instead of the inclusion of positive ones, such as nutritious food and exercise.

l Emotional health is linked to body image. The more physically active girls are, the greater their self-esteem and the more satisfied they are with their weight, whether thin or heavy. Inactive girls are more likely to dislike their appearance and see themselves as overweight.

l Even though girls have a basic knowledge of healthy eating, many consider it normal to make poor choices in diet and exercise. Meal-skipping is common and increases as they grow older, with 60 percent bypassing breakfast at least once a week and 20 percent skipping it every day. Unhealthy lifestyles increase as teens spend more time on the phone, at the computer and watching TV, as junk food supplants a healthy diet, and as motivation to exercise decreases.

l A mother’s weight, body image, attitude and health habits are strong indicators of her daughter’s. Some 89 percent of girls say their mothers make positive comments about how the girls look. Mothers who are unhappy with their own weight are more likely to have daughters similarly unhappy, regardless of how much the girls actually weigh.

Perhaps surprisingly, sexuality barely entered into the study. Lead author Judy Schoenberg explained why: “We let the girls define healthy living, and they don’t talk about sexuality in relationship to that. They say it’s about physical and emotional health, so that’s what we focused on.”

The Girl Scout report notes that 40 percent of girls ages 11 to 17 eschew sports because they feel they’re not skilled enough to participate.

Olympic sprinter Lauryn Williams, a native of Pittsburgh who won a silver medal in the 100 meters 2004, attributed her athletic career to a visit to her hometown’s Carnegie Science Center with her father when she was 9 years old. She spent most of the day racing an electronic image of Florence Griffith Joyner, finally beating the champ in mid-afternoon. Her dad enrolled her in a track program the next day.