Bullying Wrap-Up, and Halloween Reminder

Dr. Stuart Twemlow, whose work was previously discussed by Childhood Obesity News, is proprietor of the “Back Off Bully” website, a tremendous resource comprising several divisions including published papers, parenting tips, videos, school materials, services, and music. Another section concerns the Peaceful Schools Project (active 1999-2002), a joint creation of the Menninger Clinic and the Baylor College of Medicine. It contains the manuals used in the project, titled “Creating a Peaceful School Learning Environment” and “School Psychiatric Consultation Manual.”

Of course the problem with school bullying, whether done by fellow students or by teachers, is that kids suffer bad consequences. The negative effect on academic performance, through the association of higher weight and lower achievement, has been documented.

Researchers from the University of Arkansas set out to examine these relationships, and concluded:

Psychosocial variables, such as weight-based teasing, should be considered in future research examining the impact of childhood obesity on school performance and in future intervention studies.

As recently as four years ago, even after years of attempted consciousness-raising, weight-related bullying and discrimination by teachers and professors were reported to be increasing. Unlike previous investigations that only covered specific points time, a longitudinal study by the Harvard School of Public Health followed children through years of education. Journalist Angela Meadows wrote,

This particular study looked at how weight change between the ages of ten and 14 affected teacher ratings of the children’s abilities, taking a range of other factors like socioeconomic status, family situation, exercise and television time, and so on, into account.

Although this study didn’t assess the actual anti-fat attitudes of the teachers — meaning it’s not possible to link the two directly — numerous other studies have now reported negative weight-related stereotypes and anti-fat attitudes being held by teachers at every stage of the school system, from kindergarten upwards.

There is widespread conviction that when overweight kids underperform academically, anti-fat attitudes held by teachers definitely play a role.

Reverse bullying

Since this didn’t fit anywhere else, let’s include it here — a comment on Reddit’s fatlogic page, from an individual with the code name “iushciuweiush”:

Ugh I used to be a ride operator at an amusement park and was called all kinds of nasty things by fat people when I told them they were too big to ride. Hey, _______, I am putting my entire body weight into the restraint and it will not click which means it’s not restraining you which means you cannot ride. I’m literally saving your life and you are bullying the ____ out of me for it as if I personally designed this stupid ride and these stupid restraints out of some evil desire to punish fat people.

Last call for Halloween

Longtime followers of this page will recognize the picture at the top, which first appeared attached to “My Halloween, by Curly: a Suggestive Fiction,” a story reminding us that we can create new customs and a new culture to fit our needs.

Also, as long as there is still time for any late bloomers to do holiday prep, please take advantage of our tremendous catalogue of posts bursting with Halloween hints!

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Back Off Bully,” BackOffBully.com, undated
Source: “Overweight children, weight-based teasing and academic performance,” NIH.gov, 2009
Source: “Obese children do worse at school—but it may not be their fault,” QZ.com, 06/04/15
Image by Steven Depolo/Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Yes, Some Teachers Are Bullies

In yesterday’s post, “Can Teachers Be Bullies?” we learned that obese children and youth are often bullied by teachers who use the power vested in them to unreasonably and unfairly manipulate, disparage, humiliate, and punish students. We speculated on why some teachers are bullies, wondering if it is because they themselves were bullied.

Peter Fonagy, Ph.D., says yes. Teachers who make overweight kids’ lives miserable were often treated badly themselves as children — not necessarily for weight issues, but bullies have never run short of excuses. Dr. Fonagy says,

If your early experiences lead you to expect that people will not reason, but respond to force, then you are at risk of recreating this situation in your classroom.

A number of factors could be involved. The teaching profession is no bed of roses. Like everyone else, teachers have difficulties with their spouses, kids, and parents. They have health problems, financial shortfalls, self-esteem issues, substance-abuse problems, and all the other typical human woes.

Of course there is no excuse for picking on students, but plenty of accumulated free-floating unhappiness is out there, waiting to be passed along to the next generation. Katherine Kam wrote for WebMD,

A student may remind them of someone they dislike. Or, in a surprising reversal of the “teacher’s pet” syndrome, insecure teachers may bully bright students out of envy.

And before anyone has a chance to mount the high horse of righteousness, absorb this: Between male and female teachers, by their own admission, the potential to engage in bullying behavior is equally shared.

Back in 2006, Dr. Fonagy and Dr. Stuart Twemlow published, in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry, their report of a study based on an anonymous survey of 116 elementary teachers from seven different schools. Forty-five percent of the respondents admitted to having bullied at least one student. That’s almost half!

The researchers did point out that in many schools, some students are so aggressive and belligerent that educators are concerned for their own physical safety — so they put up a tough front as a preventive measure. In many cases, this involves preemptive bullying.

According to Dr. Twemlow, the majority of bullying teachers fall into the former victim category, and tend more toward absenteeism and avoidance, dealing with disciplinary matters by making referrals to their principals. Only a small minority are truly sadistic types who derive twisted pleasure from hurting the feelings of students. In an ideal world, he says, there would be a way to screen out the “nightmare teachers” who thrive on their power to cause psychological damage.

The good news is that the former victim types are more amenable to interventions, like additional training in classroom management. The article we are referencing here also includes hints usable by parents and students, for dealing with bullying teachers.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Nearly half of elementary school teachers admit to bullying,” EurekAlert.org, 06/28/06
Source: “Teachers Who Bully,” WebMD.com, 2006
Photo credit: fsse8info on Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

No Forgiveness for Fat

As we have seen, a very large percentage of overweight and obese children have experienced bullying, especially at school, which makes a certain amount of sense because after all, that is where children spend quite a lot of time in the company of others.

Dr. Rebecca Puhl has a very long title — Deputy Director for the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity and Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at UConn — which comes as no surprise, because she knows more than anybody about weight bias, of which bullying is a large and ugly subcategory.

Dr. Puhl says,

At school, weight-based bullying is reported by adolescents to be among the most frequent forms of peer harassment. Parents similarly view weight-based bullying to be the most common form of bullying that youth face, irrespective of parents’ or their child’s weight. Further corroborating these findings are teachers who report a link between high body mass index (BMI) and victimization.

That sounds straightforward enough, but there is plenty of nuance to be found in the topic. For instance, a study of more than 821 children revealed that the reporting rate is uneven. If you ask mothers, about 44 percent of children are bullied. According to teachers, it’s about 34percent. But when it came to the kids themselves, only about 25 percent self-reported being bullied.

This is an interesting discrepancy. Are they afraid or ashamed to admit that other kids pick on them? Are mothers being just extra-sensitive and over-protective?

From that same study, we learned that amongst children with different ethnic and economic backgrounds, varying degrees of academic success, and a range of social relationship aptitude, victimization “is not moderated by any of the covariates.” To put it another way, which the report also did, “No protective factors were identified.”

For most kids in this situation, there is no forgiveness for fat. Even the lucky few who are naturally funny don’t catch a break. They are still teased and poked — they just get a few laughs to sweeten the bitter pill.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

The illustration at the top of this page quotes some lyrics from a Bob Dylan song, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” Don’t worry about what the title might mean — after all, it was the Sixties. But the words describe the situation many overweight people, both children and adults, find themselves in. No matter what they do, somebody is not happy.

This is indicated by the titles of just two of Dr. Puhl’s many publications: “Weight-based victimization: bullying experiences of weight loss treatment-seeking youth” and “Stigma as a (Dis)incentive for Weight Loss and Healthy Lifestyle Behaviors.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Pervasive Problem of Weight-Based Bullying in Youth,” Medscape.com, 10/29/14
Source: “Children who are obese, more likely to be bullied, regardless of other
factors,” NIH.gov, 05/03/10
Image by BobDylan.com

Parenting Styles Examined

In the previous post, we spoke of the four parenting styles defined by the authors of a Canadian study based on government statistics about youth from 1994 to 2008.

The authoritarian parent is described as demanding and not responsive. The authoritative parent is demanding, but balances it out with responsiveness. The permissive parent is responsive, but not demanding, a situation that may or may not lead to trouble, depending on the environment and the child’s basic disposition. The negligent parent is neither responsive nor demanding, and, again, while many young people flounder under this non-regime, others somehow manage to thrive anyway.

When they have authoritative parents, firm but fair, both preschool and school-age children are less likely to become obese than their age-mates whose parents are of the oppressive, authoritarian variety. The study’s lead author, Lisa Kakinami, told a journalist,

Authoritarian parenting may translate to parents not responding to children’s cues of hunger and/or feeling full, and demanding or controlling the child’s energy intake. That results in the children’s ability to regulate their own energy intake being underdeveloped. These children may be more likely to overindulge when given the opportunity.

For readers who know anything at all about childhood obesity, it will come as no surprise that these findings are influenced by economic realities. The effects of these different “styles” play out differently, depending on family income. The preschool children are most noticeably affected by poverty. In families with that designation, the kids are 20 percent more likely to become obese, and, here comes the interesting part — “this risk was regardless of parenting style.”

In this maze of multifactorialism, the challenge is to figure out which of many factors will tend to be activated under different circumstances. That same study found that four widespread risk factors are parental obesity, breastfeeding duration, childhood television use, and nighttime sleep duration.

Different emphasis

Another study, from the STRONG Kids program, concerned itself with 22 contributory factors that had been previously identified, which are all listed here for the sake of completeness:

[…] child ethnicity; gender; nighttime sleep duration; time spent at home watching television per day; TV in view where family eats most meals; TV in bedroom; breastfeeding duration; family status (single parent vs. two parents); maternal education; parent BMI; family history of overweight/obesity; parent nutrition-label knowledge; participation in Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) supplemental assistance program; age of attendance in childcare; childcare nutrition policies; child’s diet intake; fat content of milk; sugar, corn syrup, or honey added to baby’s formula before 1 year of age; perceived dietary quality; neighborhood social cohesion; physical activity opportunities; and parental feeding practices.

Those researchers concluded that the key risk factors, and focus areas for the prevention of obesity, are “child sleep duration, parent BMI, and parental restrictive feeding practices.”

Parent BMI does not really come under the heading of parenting style, but the other two main factors do, as well as many of the remaining 19 factors that were named.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Childhood obesity is linked to poverty and parenting style,” Concordia.ca, 11/10/15
Source: “Risk Factors for Overweight/Obesity in Preschool Children: An Ecological Approach,” UNL.edu, October 2013
Photo by The Honest Company on Unsplash