Gender roles are still very much in place, and if Mother does most of the shopping and cooking, she controls what appears on the dinner table. Or maybe Dad cooks, and Mom does the monthly weigh-in or waist measurement. A recent post pointed out how beneficial it would be if all parents in the dicey situation of being expected to keep an eye on a child’s weight were able to do that effectively.
Related posts have been picking away at the challenge of how to encourage parents to engage without arousing new instances of counterproductive behavior patterns that have already done incalculable damage.
Revolutions do happen
Several decades back, Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.) began a long reign of ascendency among the child-rearing demographic in general. Grown-ups found Dr. Thomas Gordon’s advice easy to take on board, and children responded to the techniques. (As a bonus, parents found that the same precepts could often be adapted to the sometimes brutal and stifling adult world.)
P.E.T. revealed itself as being pretty close to a one-size-fits-all program. In the obesity prevention realm, what seems to be needed is a similarly effective method of dealing with the potentiality of a child developing a weight problem — without increasing the likelihood that the child will develop a weight problem.
Home, sweet what?
Where do weight problems come from? One clue is revealed by an article titled, “Children whose parents lack warmth more likely to grow up obese, study finds.” The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children has proven very useful over the years to the numerous researchers who have mined it for all sorts of raw data and suggestive conclusions. Some of the matters it looked into included…
[…] the association between parenting style during early childhood and a child’s weight later in childhood and in early adolescence, late adolescence and early adulthood.
Conscientious self-reporting by the adults originally involved helped sort them into four categories, according to parenting style:
1. authoritative (maintain clear boundaries but are also warm)
2. authoritarian (maintain strict discipline and show little warmth)
3. permissive (empathic but have few rules)
4. neglectful or uninvolved (emotionally uninvolved and have few rules)
The offspring of 2 and 4, authoritarian and neglectful, were…
[…] more likely to have a higher weight than those who experienced authoritative parenting. The results for permissive parenting were not statistically significant.
Researcher Alexa Segal told a journalist, “Authoritarian mothers are characterized by being demanding and controlling, while having low warmth and responsiveness,” said Segal. This style sounds familiar to the fans of comedian Marc Maron, as we have seen.
Prof. Louise Baur of the World Obesity Federation has pointed out the difficulty of raising healthy kids in the modern world. On the other hand,
This study highlights the fundamental importance of parents in raising healthy children.
Parents who are able to set appropriate limits for their child, while bringing warmth and sensitivity to the relationship, may be better able to help their child be as healthy as possible.
But then… There is always the risk that parental participation, or even just a reasonable level of concern, could backfire and be perceived as fat-shaming. When emotions are raw, almost anything that another person says or does is susceptible to interpretation as hostile. Despite a helpful website that offers an entire series of articles about obesity prevention, sometimes the chemistry simply isn’t right.
Perhaps the best answer is, hook the kid up with Brainweighve, then stand back and hope they figure it out.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Parent Effectiveness Training,” GordonTraining.com, undated
Source: “Children whose parents lack warmth more likely to grow up obese, study finds,”
TheGuardian.com, 10/18/22
Image by trthiet182/Pixabay
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One Response
We appreciate the support/shout out to PET. 🙂 But more importantly, this research on kids and obesity and parenting is pretty sobering and interesting. How you parent, impacts everything doesn’t it….!?