Overweight Awareness Monitors at Home

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

Parents As Overweight Awareness Monitors

Yes, of course parents are legitimate observers and recorders of their offsprings’ weight. However, this does not give them license to make a child’s life miserable by harping on the subject, or to blab about it to friends or strangers.

In a best-case scenario, a mom or dad is reasonable, tactful, sensitive, and several other adjectives that imply sanity, about how and when to weigh the child with a problem. If dangerous amounts of lard are obviously accumulating, what kind of reminder might be effective, and not make matters worse? It would be smart to seek advice from a qualified pro.

For instance, controversy might be avoided by designating a certain day once a month to check in with the scale and make a note on a chart. Although a parent has the authority to be an Overweight Awareness Monitor, and maybe even the ability to intervene reasonably, this is by no means an opportunity for sarcasm, shaming, threats, or any other brand of intimidation.

Parents need to have their stuff together

Just a few years back in Britain, a long-term study of 19,000 families concentrated on the emotional stability of new parents. The mothers and fathers of babies both have concerns, though not necessarily the same ones. The dads might worry more about making enough money to feed everybody and keep a roof over their heads. The moms might be more anxious about the new baby’s birth weight and their ability to figure out how to breastfeed successfully.

In any case, if parents feel shaky about their social, mental health, and economic situations, that can spell difficulty for the new family member. Researchers noticed a subtle difference between dads and moms:

The analysis found that fathers’ distress reported in infancy, but not during toddlerhood, was associated with steeper increases in BMI and excess body fat for both girls and boys. However, mothers’ distress reported in both infancy and toddlerhood was associated with steeper increases in BMI and excess body fat in only girls.

Every time a new subtlety or wrinkle is found in an aspect of parenting that is under the microscope, legions of graduate students rediscover the passion that brought them to the field in the first place, and renewed impetus to figure out exactly what is going on. Here is another quotation regarding this same University College London study, and others like it:

Distress experienced by mothers and fathers in the first few years of a child’s life, particularly during infancy, is linked with accelerated weight and excess fat gain from age 5 to 14 years, according to new research being presented at the European Congress on Obesity (ECO) held online this year.

Next steps

When a child is on the verge of sliding over into the overweight segment of the population, it seems obvious that their parents ought to take an active part in keeping track of the stats, and to qualify themselves as capable of determining when some sort of professional intervention appears to be called for. But as we have seen, their best intentions and efforts may be impeded by problems they could use knowledgeable health with. And sometimes…

There are two words that experts especially regret having to apply to parents: “neglectful” and “authoritarian” — otherwise known as “not caring” and “caring too much” — because in either case, their children just might turn out overweight. And while these parenting styles may seem at first glance to be opposites, they have been determined by highly placed academics to spring from the same source: a lack of emotional warmth.

This was learned by observing the families of 10,000 children. Usually, such reluctance to accept interference is founded in a very basic belief that goes something like,

This is how my parents raised me, and I turned out fine.

Parents can be so defensive that many professionals, even those from such prestigious institutions as Imperial College’s Centre for Health Economics & Policy Innovation, tend to regard the subject as taboo. Naturally, Childhood Obesity News is eager to take a closer look at this thorny problem.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Emotional distress in fathers and mothers linked to heightened risk of overweight in their children,” 05/19/21, EurekAlert.org
Source: “Children whose parents lack warmth more likely to grow up obese, study finds,” TheGuardian.com, 10/18/22
Image by flaviopantera7/Pixabay

Obesity’s Price Tag

These items relate to a subject often mentioned here: the societal cost of obesity. Every so often, along comes a news story that points out another example of how the system does not work as well as our society actually needs for it to work.

For instance, within the past year, India has been mentioned as a place where bariatric surgery has really caught on in a big way. Leaving all other factors aside for the sake of discussion, it is possible to question the benefit to society as a whole. It can’t be considered good for a society to have a large proportion of its members absorbed by the overwhelmingly intense preparation agenda for this sort of operation.

However much of a blessing it may be in a particular case, and in the long run, bariatric surgery is a very life-consuming project in terms of burning up time, energy, goodwill, money, and other resources.

But wait, there is more

Then, after the actual procedure, there is a similarly unproductive spell, as the patient is, to a greater or lesser degree, disabled for a considerable period of time. Even barring any unexpected side effects, there are new routines to learn and new norms to become accustomed to, on every side.

There will be medical self-care chores, and record-keeping, and check-up visits. Maybe time will be set aside for meditation. The patient actively participating in their recovery is unable to do very much else, at least for a while, if the newly required lifestyle is to “stick.”

To complete their usual work, or family caregiving, or volunteer activities in the community — effective participation in even one of those categories could prove to be too much to expect, and for quite some time. Somewhere along the line, a price is extracted from — and paid by — society as a whole.

A bit of history

By 2018, 60% of Americans — in other words, more than half of us, over 180 million people — were overweight or obese. That statistic was responsible for “$480.7 billion in direct health care costs in the U.S., with an additional $1.24 trillion in indirect costs due to lost economic productivity.”

The total amount of around $1.72 trillion was equivalent to almost one-tenth of the total Gross Domestic Product. As a risk factor, obesity accounted for close to half of the accumulated cost of chronic diseases in the USA. It should be, and is, possible to acknowledge this reality in a tactful, frank, non-judgmental way, not involving cruelty or injustice.

These words are worth repeating:

Whether or not it is their fault, and whether or not others spitefully blame them, and regardless of whether it is fair — in one way or another, obese people constitute an expense to society.

We also discussed whether poverty causes obesity, or obesity causes poverty, and concluded that both propositions are sadly and eternally true.

And another sad-but-true thing

If fat-shaming and fat-blaming have not been able to revolutionize the situation in all these years, those techniques are unlikely to bring about change in the future.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “America’s Obesity Crisis: The Health and Economic Costs of Excess Weight,” MilkenInstitute.org,” 10/26/18
Image by bergy59/Pixabay

Drugs and Surgery — Reevaluation Is Inevitable

A person who lives for several decades is bound to notice something interesting, as time goes on — namely, that one generation’s scandal is the next generation’s yawn. Around the turn of the century in the USA, for instance, a decent man didn’t appear in public without a head covering; and not just any hat, but one with a hatband, a dent in the top, and a brim.

In 1900, women who initiated divorces were as rare as hen’s teeth. By the year 2000, it was quite ordinary to meet a woman who had divorced three or four husbands.

In some times and places, people are implacably set in their ways, while in others, they can’t stand to do things the same way from one week to the next. Philosophers have spoken millions of words about the human tendency to resist change, especially in instances where some members of the population are attempting to force others to act normally.

In that discussion, of course, one issue is all-important. Who is privileged to decide what is considered normal in society, as opposed to what is regarded as unacceptably deviant?

Today and us

“Who died and made you king?” is a sarcastic question that many people have good cause, several times a day, to telepathically ask a passerby some version of. More specifically, they cannot help wondering why they have to go through life hindered by the judgment of others regarding the size and condition of their bodies.

In a way, to be grossly obese is like having two heads — you just know that everybody is staring, and even if they don’t judge with hostility, they probably feel pity. So then, you spend the rest of the day mulling over the question of which is worse, hatred or contempt?

There may be nothing basically wrong, in an abstract sense, with the educational and medical establishments of society having concern about people’s health. In a general way, it is comforting to know that some of the people who run things are in charge of seeing that you don’t catch the plague or smallpox.

That is managed, in a civilized society, by having public health authorities in charge of identifying and sequestering people with a contagious disease, and convincing the healthy ones to get a shot or something, so they don’t catch the illness or spread it around. Even the most ideologically strict proponents of freedom can usually see the sense in that.

What authorities?

But when it comes to obesity, even the most convincing arguments about public responsibility for public health tend to break down. Many people feel that it is no one’s business, especially that of a government bureaucracy, to know how many pounds the scale registers when you step on it. Perhaps a valid civic-minded argument can be made for weighing a newborn baby, because at that age, weight is the most obvious characteristic that can be non-invasively measured.

But ought the authorities to care quite so much about a kindergartener’s poundage? Does the System really need to know the circumference of each 13-year-old’s waistline? Should the authorities embarrass your children at school by weighing them?

An overview

A while back, Childhood Obesity News quoted Southern California health official Jonathan Fielding:

Public health works by successive redefinition of the unacceptable.

Consider the saying, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Nobody is sure who first said those exact words. It is certain, however, that trade union activist Nicholas Klein expressed the same concept in different words, and many other people have, too. There was a time when nobody had ever heard of a five-day work week or a paid vacation.

But thanks to the efforts of millions of staunch labor supporters, the unacceptable was successively redefined and became the norm. A similar process occurred back when former First Lady Michelle Obama worked to warn against and prevent childhood obesity. Voices were raised against the tyranny of governmental interference in kids’ eating habits and of families’ responsibility in that area.

Still, after two presidential terms, fewer Americans were either ignoring or laughing at the concept that childhood obesity should be taken seriously. Now it appears that the same kind of gradual change might be taking place in regard to both weight-loss drugs and bariatric surgery for teens and maybe even children.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by Pat Hartman