Overweight kids- Who's to blame

Blacklance36

A friend of mine was bragging about how "big" her 4 year old daughter was. She was not taller than average, she weighed more than the average, and for some reason this was a badge of honor to her.

I agree with a lot of others here, its the parents fault. But look at most parents, they are overweight too.

djshari

I agree. In terms of young children, if there is no medical condition, then it is the parents fault.
And this is coming from a girl whose entire family is overweight, there has to be a link somewhere?
At the end of the day, parents need to teach their children to eat healthily and exercise.

Yeah, I also did mean to say young children. If you have a teenager who goes out and buys take away with their wages I suppose it's hard to do much, that being said they should have been taught to eat properly by then

It's funny that you say this because a lot of the kids I know who's parents were super healthy ended up with kids who rebelled because they never had junk food and went nuts when they finally had access to it.

craigmandu

a topic that is missing here is television commercials. The TV bombards kids with food commercials and I know that food commercials cause people to eat more than they need too. I certainly eat more when i watch networks with advertisements. televised sports is the worst. they advertise the worst food you can eat.

You see food advertisements during sporting events? I only ever see drug commercials and beer commercials.

VeganSurfer

The parents, without a shadow of a doubt...providing there isn't an underlying medical problem that is causing the child to be overweight.
Child abuse.

Bekahmardis

I see him making good choices now on his own and I'm thrilled for him. But I do feel it was my lack of guidance that let him get to this point. Blaming the meds was my cop out. I'm done with that now.

Good for you! That had to have been a really tough realization, but you took the plunge, you own the issue and you're fixing the problem. Definitely deserving of a high-five there! Kudos!

devinpantess

I don't know - my daughter is overweight (age 5, 72 lbs) but her brother is not (age 9, 68 lbs). My daughter is very sedentary, and my son is very athletic, just like his mom and dad. Personally, I race triathlon and carefully monitor my intake but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get her to be active and do the same. She's 5 - she just isn't into it yet.

At school, I assume she's eating pretty well with the lunches they provide. My ex and I try our best to feed them healthy meals at home, but she's still not losing weight. If we don't watch her portions she will eat, eat, eat! We went to a birthday party the other day, and there was pizza served. I came over to check on her, and asked how many pieces she ate. She said 4. I don't even eat 4 pieces! That's close to 800 calories.

She always complains about her belly being too big. I hate to think she has weight issues already at age 5. The only thing we can do is keep her on a calorie-restricted diet and get her to be more active. It's been challenging because her mom and I are divorced.

billsica

sullus

Not the parents. The mother. I bring them to hockey, she cooks. you do the math.

dbmata

I saw an article on my FB feed today about personal trainers claiming that parents were to blame for their overweight children.

Those trainers would be accurate. Parents are responsible for parenting, even though many today would not like to be. They'd rather bro down hard with their kids and be "buddies."

Parents are responsible for teaching good nutritional habits, and when they don't, kids get fat. Simple as that. There is one petulant, caterwauling claim that it's not fair because food companies advertise so much.

So what. Advertising is a part of life, and is just another hurdle to overcome in the journey that is training a child to become a useful adult.

rekus73

You are 100% right...I am a mother of 2 kids...one of them is a little overweight...and I take full responsibility for it... I buy the food that is in my house...I eat healthy...We eat at home...I cook from scratch...however I am the one responsible for buying chips, cookies....and sugary cereal...I am learning to say no ... and keeping that stuff out of my house since I am not the one eating it... but if there is no medical reason....the responsibility falls solely on parents...

Tristaan

Parents who either don't know any better, or don't care; school systems that cut funding for health, physical education, and sports programs, doctors that are afraid to "insult" a patient by telling them the truth, the food industry for filling our foods with bio-altering chemicals and super-concentrated sugars, and the advertisers who sell their products.

ILiftHeavyAcrylics

Another thought on school lunches:

When I started teaching they gave us a handout with the rough calorie count for a school lunch. The high school portion was roughly 800 calories, so I asked why it was so high. I was told that it's because over 50% of our students were living in poverty, and we had to assume that school breakfast and school lunch were the only meals those students would get that day.

Crankstr

Not the parents. The mother. I bring them to hockey, she cooks. you do the math.

when they have no front teeth it will be your fault!

















*note to mods and report happy people...attempt at humor*

wendybird5

I say the parents based on my own experience.

Growing up my mother always cooked very healthy while my dad was the junk food junky. I was never a fat kid growing up thanks to a mother who didn't believe in microwaves, instant anything or fast food. Both my parents worked full time and my mother doesn't drive so she biked everywhere so it wasn't like she had nothing but free time to cook. She made all our food from scratch and she did it by spending each Sunday buying fresh food and prepping all our food for the week so that after work it was just a matter of putting something in the oven or heating it up on the stove for us to have dinner. Dessert was not a regular part of dinner. We had it occasionally and usually it was a fruit cobbler or fruit pie. Ever so often she would order pizza for us as a treat and a break for herself.

My dad, on the other hand, loved Burger King, soda, chips and having seconds. As a teenager, I started eating double servings at dinner like he did and enjoyed fast food and would get it with my own money ever so often. Since my parents had me do chores and wouldn't let me wallow in front of the TV all day, I didn't get huge, but I did start to get a bit pudgy around this time.

But the real weight gain for me started in college when I became responsible for my own food choices. It took me years until I realized there were psychological reasons for the way I used food. I just thought I was meant to be fat. But that is a whole 'nother Oprah...

JoanB5

Very difficult when they have a la carte at schools and you have no idea what they are eating. You can feed them "healthy" supper, you can have "healthy" snacks available, but if they are downing several serving of fried chicken fingers at school, it's going to catch up with them. And you can only motivate so far without embittering them. I do try, but especially with pre-teens you have to be careful. It's time for them to start owning their own bodies and choices.

Another way to think about it. This week, the FDA approved the marketing of the "morning after" pill over the counter to girls 15 and above. What does that tell you about respect and the role of the parent?

sullus

Not the parents. The mother. I bring them to hockey, she cooks. you do the math.

when they have no front teeth it will be your fault!

















*note to mods and report happy people...attempt at humor*

Hey, nothing better than a few lost teeth or a broken jaw to help you along the weight loss path.

contingencyplan

I buy the groceries in my house. If the house isn't full of cakes and chips and things, they can't eat it. Problem pretty much solves itself. And TV/video games or not, I've never had a problem getting my son to go out and run through the woods with the neighborhood kids playing games and such. Maybe it's different for some.

Not having woods to run though is one issue. One of the big issues is that in the city the only things kids can safely do outside requires getting involved in organized sporting activities with mandatory practices and such. There is no "going out and playing" inside of apartment buildings in the city. Not unless you want your kids playing in a busy street.

Nutrition, however, is another matter and parents are 100% to blame there.

thatgeekinit

Does the marketing, cheapness, and high availability of processed high calorie junk food and sugary drinks make us want them or are they that cheap and available and tasty because that is what we really want? It is a bit of both I think. The food companies have turned food into a fix for our overstressed American style lives. It is not a drug, but they know exactly, and test to make sure, how to make their products have the perfect combination of sugar, fat, and salt to make them very tempting. At the same time, they tend to be low satisfaction foods once they get into your stomach so you don't feel full when, calorie wise, you ought to.

The food industry can be blamed for some of the problem, especially among poor children who often can't access or can't afford healthy fresh foods. There is also strong evidence that television advertising is much more effective on young children than adults.

The government has some blame in this because for decades they let the food industry sell their surplus ingredients to be made into cheap school lunches, much more likely to be eaten by poor kids than rich kids. They also kept the price of sucrose artificially high to protect a small number of wealthy sugar company owners in the south which pushed the junk food industry to replace sucrose with HFC wherever possible.

Government economic policies have also been uniformly anti-family. In most rich countries, everyone gets some paid leave, often more than big companies in the US offer voluntarily, and paid parental leave, nonexistent in the US, is guaranteed in most of Europe. At-will employment also factors into it, since particularly at the low end of the market, parents will often be forced to choose between disobeying an employer and risking termination, or getting home in time to feed their kids a proper meal. European countries also subsidize child-care and universal pre-school too. There is a good argument that most women serve the larger economy better by working and letting a smaller group of professionals and semi-professionals watch children all-day, then we ought to make pre-school affordable.


Still those who can afford to buy fresh food and don't share the blame.

carissar7

It is 100% the parent's fault. My boyfriend's mother is overweight, his 19 year old sister is borderline obese and his 5 year old sister is well on her way down the same path. Every time I eat dinner over there, there is always a crying/screaming match with his 5 year old sister because she always wants dessert before she goes to bed. So what does she get every single night? Cookies, cake, any type of chocolate with a glass of milk. It has become a ritual. She gets whatever she wants so she doesn't get upset. Growing up in my house, you only got sweets after a meal as a special treat once in a while. NOT every single day! It drives me nuts and I always feel like saying something to his mother but it's not my place. Their family also doesn't have much money so his mom buys the cheapest foods she can which means lots of frozen chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese, frozen pizzas, chinese food, and fast food. I feel bad for his little sister and hope that she doesn't get overweight as she gets older. She's already a chubby kid and her eating habits are not helping her. If she was my kid I would have put a stop to this right away.

His other sister (who is severely overweight) just does not care about her body and eats whatever she wants and does not exercise. My boyfriend would tell me that growing up, she would hide junk food in her closet and go on a binge because she "wasn't allowed to eat junk food" so she would eat entire boxes of oreos in the closet. So my response was, 'WHY THE $@*&$ WAS IT IN THE HOUSE THEN??!?!?" Do these parents have NO common sense to realize that if it's IN THE HOUSE, kids are going to find a way to eat it! His excuse was that his dad liked to eat those things once in a while, well guess what that's not a good enough reason for me. If your child is hiding boxes of food in the closet there is nothing you can do to reprimand them except REMOVE the junk food from the house entirely. It's bad parenting in my eyes.

SanteMulberry

partly parents and partly schools/government!

Nope. Theres no partly. Its fully parents. If your school doesn't provide healthy foods and keeps pushing high calories junk foods then talk to them. Many communities are now doing it and for almost the same cost. The fact that NO parent screamed at the schools when they passed out pizza as a serving of veggies shows that parents are the one neglecting.

As a teacher, I would like to know how what I do is responsible for obese children who come to MY classroom? Am I the one feeding them junk food instead of nutritious food? No. Am I the one who allows them to sit on their butts and play video games, watch TV, text, etc, when they should be outdoors playing and getting exercise? NO.

AND, I would also like to add that I teach HEALTH, and right now I am making a very serious effort to teach these children all about healthy eating, nutrition and the importance of exercise. I'm not harming them, I'm helping them.

IT IS ENTIRELY the fault of the parents AND partially the fault of the pediatricians who refuse to tell the parents their child needs to lose weight, for fear of "offending" the parents.

true, doctors in general are sorely lacking the will to tell people the truth. But, I think this is in part due to the food industry somehow influencing the medical industry as well as the government. don't ask me how. its just too convenient a dynamic not to suspect some influence.

Some in the medical research community are speaking out but they must tread lightly as they are often dependent on government grants for their research funding. And government, is, of course, highly influenced by Big Ag and the Big Food conglomerates.