Something To Fix
From as early as the age of three, children who are overweight are being stigmatized by adults and by other children.
Youngsters who report teasing, rejection, bullying and other types of abuse because of their weight are two to three times more likely to report suicidal thoughts as well as to suffer from other health issues such as high blood pressure and eating disorders, researchers said.
“The quality of life for kids who are obese is comparable to the quality of life of kids who have cancer,” Puhl said, citing one study. “These kids are facing stigma from everywhere they look in society, whether it’s media, school or at home.”
Several studies showed that overweight girls got less college financial support from their parents than average weight girls. Other studies showed teasing by parents was common.
I don’t even know what to say. This is the reality of the cultural stigma we have, and it doesn’t help, doesn’t fix any problems, just hurts and damages people. I don’t know how to fix it. I’m still dealing with the effects of it. But maybe spreading the word is the first step.
Thanks to Cat for helping me bring down the room with this one. If you need cheering up, here is a lolcat.
Posted by mo pie
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My first memory of being teased was when I was six years old. The words “Fatty, fatty, two by four” when shouted by fellow six year olds has a tendency to stick with a kid forever. Kids are already under more stress than they need to be, adding this to the mix can only make them miserable.
It’s wrong, except not really:
“3) This kinda goes with #1 but when a child is obese it is the parents’ fault. The parents are the ones who are responsible for feeding their toddler and when that toddler gets addicted to food and is 2x the size of other kids their age, it’s obviously not the 3-year-old’s fault! The parents have to learn that it’s not okay to feed their kid 10 boxes of oreos! They have to learn to say “NO” when the kid demands unnecessary and excess treats. ”
Oh god, now I’m depressed again.
I hear you, mo pie. I sometimes feel like I’m shouting into the void.
Okay, I get the plight of fat kids, but seriously! NO ONE can compare fat to cancer-that is just fucking ridiculous. Having a poor body image is no comparison to knowing you may die. NOT EVEN CLOSE. I had a friend who died from cancer and that just pisses me off.
Did you see this from Kate Harding? http://kateharding.net/2007/07/12/fat-hatred-kills-part-one/
Sorry if this has been posted already, but I read the entire thing, and it fits (kinda) with this entry.
I heard that the Surgeon General nominee is wanting his priority #1 to be “childhood obesity.” Honestly, I understand that we need to be healthier…but there are PLENTY of inactive, junk-food eating skinny kids (trust me, I was friends with them when I was a kid, and I teach them now that I’m a teacher–they exist in droves).
I really prefer programs that focus on things like–let’s encourage kids (and all of us, really) to get outside and play more, and to eat more fruits and vegetables and whole foods. When we make it about “obesity” we’re totally missing the point, and it is further stigmatizing kids that are already having to fight to prove that they have worth and value to a culture that tells them that they only will have that worth if they can slim down.
I mean, seriously–is the fundamental point only to make the fat kids less fat? No way. I think we as a nation, though, like to see things in black and white, and think that everything is within our clear control. So if we can believe “fat people eat junk and don’t exercise” and “thin people are healthy and eat right and exercise” it is a really convenient way to categorize things. Unfortunately, though, it’s also a false way to categorize them. But, most people prefer convenience to truth anyway…
My father in law refers to our 2 year old girl as the Iron Ingot. Never mind that all the other kids we have adopted are extremely skinny- we must be doing *something* wrong with her. If he saw the foods she eats, he’d be changing his mind. My nickname for her is the Fruit Bat- she only likes to eat raw, crunchy fruits and veggies. I am lucky if I can get her to eat two protein items in a day- and I can never get cereals or starches in her.
It’s shameful that on some level, he is already stigmatizing her and shading her relationship with food. I have been adamantly arguing this with him- that even in jest, this is not a good thing for him to do. He thinks I am being too militant- after all, I’m a fattie- what could I know about it?
“Teasing”, my Aunt Fanny. What I went through in my family, and what a lot of kids are going through now, is more properly classified as torture and abuse.
My mom was very upfront with her reasons for the verbal abuse (which she actively encouraged my dad and brothers to join in on). It was to “shame me into shape”.
What she actually shamed me into was hiding food, secret eating, binging & purging, and a lifetime of stress eating, guilt, and anxiety.
Thanks again for the eating disorder, Mom.
nj nnjhn – You are right that being fat isn’t like having cancer. But that isn’t what the researchers said. They said that their quality of life is a low as kids who have cancer. Quality of life is measured by subjective measures, so it doesn’t mean that one situation is as bad as another, it means the child’s perception of their situation is as bad as kids who have cancer.
And we aren’t talking about ‘poor body image’ here. These kids are getting the message, these days, that they are going to die. But the difference is that they are responsible for their own “illness” and only they can “cure” themselves. If they don’t they hear that they are stupid, lazy and ugly. I imagine that this can make a child’s world seem pretty awful.
God knows I was suicidal as early as eleven, just when I really started to chub out. My family wasn’t too bad, with the exception of my older brother, but that’s to be expected. But at school, it was sheer torture. I was the only fat girl in the entire class. And to make matter worse, we had a real live beauty queen transfer to our school that year. She was actually first runner up in the Junior Miss USA pageant. And she did not like me. So in the course of a year, these kids went from being my friends, to being these cruel, judgmental assholes. Boys and girls alike made fun of me; my nickname was Jenny Craig, and they’d sing the little jingle every time they saw me. Girls shunned me and wouldn’t let me sit with them at lunch, let alone associate with them outside of school. Boys would come up behind me and belch on my head, kick me, punch me, or dump food in my hair. They’d try to pull off my pants to see what size they were, or reach down my shirt and grab my bra. They told me they wished I would die, so they wouldn’t have to see my fat disgusting face anymore. I used to get notes stuffed into my desk about how I was too ugly even to be raped. I had one friend, and honestly, she was as bad as everyone else, making sure that I knew she was my friend out of pity, telling me that I was “fat enough to be on a talk show.” But I was so lonely, I accepted that. I came to believe that I had to settle for whatever friends would put up with my presence. I came home from school everyday crying, and even at home, the kids would call me, scream “Fatass!” into the phone, and hang up laughing. And the thing is, I can remember sitting at my great-grandmother’s one day, enjoying a visit, and realizing, I wouldn’t have cared about being fat, if my classmates could just let me go one day without being told it made me a pig, a cow, a subhuman thing that they had the right to belittle at every opportunity.
The SG nominee is making childhood obesity his #1 target because it’s a fail-safe: If he doesn’t manage to make a difference in childhood obesity rates, he can throw up his hands and blame the parents. It is a timeless and beloved pastime. This morning I followed a link from Dooce to these astonishing competitive acrobats and… well, check out comment #2: http://www.glumbert.com/media/acrobatic
Several studies showed that overweight girls got less college financial support from their parents than average weight girls. Other studies showed teasing by parents was common.
Unless they are comparing two girls, one fat and one thin, with the same parents, I call shenanigans. Studies also show that obesity is linked to economic class. Correlation does not equal causation.
I feel lucky that I wasn’t a fat kid, so I was never teased for that. I always thought I was fat, though, because I was a head taller and quite a bit bigger than a lot of the girls in my class, but when I look back at pictures of me as a kid, I wasn’t fat at all. Damn conformist society.
My five-year-old daughter is not overweight but is chunky, especially compared to her best friend who is a preschool version of a supermodel — thin and all legs. They spend every weekend day doing the same amount of physical activity, swimming until they are each pruned up. They eat about the same amount and types of foods, except the skinny one eats a ton of candy, all day every day, and the chunky one only eats candy once a week or so. Go figure.
So far they are both too busy and happy to notice the differences in their bodies, but for how long?
“Several studies showed that overweight girls got less college financial support from their parents than average weight girls. Other studies showed teasing by parents was common.”
Woah, that’s exactly what happened with me. Even though my sister had a much lower GPA, a terrible track record with financial and self-management, she was fully funded for her education while I had to actually fight my parents to stay in college, finally resorting to private loans and moving really far away from them despite a 3.8 GPA and consistently earning honors all the way through school.
Me and my mother were just talking about the cultural stigma on Thursday. It’s breeding a bunch of shame-filled children to become shame-filled adults which will skyrocket the diet industry and supply jobs for more therapists. I was teased and am sometime still teased about being fat which doesn’t help because I’ve wrestled with my weight for years until I finally learned to love my body.
You know first it was they divided us by gender, then class, race, sexuality, and now weight. What are they going to do next?