Why Can't My Child Stop Eating?. Debbie Danowski
a musical play convene after the performance to eat cake and cookies at the wrap party.
• A child invites others over to a pizza birthday celebration.
• A high school student puts money in a vending machine to buy two candy bars for a quick lunch so she has more time to talk to the boy she likes.
• Stressed-out over constant bickering, a parent relents, giving a teenager $20 to have dinner out with friends.
• After a relationship breakup, a high school student eats a half-gallon of ice cream.
• Watching television cooking shows is a regular part of one family’s routine.
Does any one of these sound familiar? If not, were you able to come up with your own list? Whatever you found, take a moment to look it over. Are you surprised? How many of the items on your list did you do as a child? What about your parents? Do you know if they, too, did those things as children?
Don’t worry if you weren’t able to make a long list or couldn’t answer all of the previous questions. Later in the book, you will be asked to write more about this. Right now, the important thing is for you to begin thinking about the role food plays in your child’s life.
While you are contemplating all of this, think, too, about the fact that as a society, we give lip service to the idea that fruits and vegetables are important for our health, whereas our actions indicate that we value the flavor of fatty, high-calorie foods more because of their taste. “Remember, actions speak louder than words.”
While many parents would assert that they value fruits and vegetables, think for a minute exactly how that value is demonstrated. In many families, a great deal of energy is expended urging children to eat healthy foods, including fruits and vegetables. Sometimes even threats or bribes are used to accomplish this. Yet, how frequently do parents in these families actually model the behavior—eating fruits and vegetables—themselves? Or, if a parent tells a child to eat all of his or her vegetables so that he or she can have dessert, then the subtle message being sent is that dessert is more desirable than the actual meal. Dessert becomes a reward to be eaten only after a chore (eating vegetables) is accomplished.
Similarly, when a child is rewarded with special foods after accomplishing a difficult task or attending to an unpleasant event, the unconscious message is that the “reward foods”—usually high-calorie dessert items—are a means of soothing unpleasant feelings. Or, if a child’s school uses dessert items to celebrate birthdays and holidays, the lesson being imparted is that these items are more desirable than the everyday foods he or she regularly eats. This creates a food hierarchy wherein certain items are more important than others. Let’s consider what can happen when children are given these messages.
A child who receives the message that high-calorie dessert items are a form of comfort during difficult times will continue to turn to these when life becomes unpleasant. In the same way, a child taught to use these items to celebrate special events will become dependent on certain foods to have fun or receive satisfaction from life. Taken to the extreme, this behavior could lead to obesity, even death.
Though many of these social practices were established years before the current rise in obesity, the difference now is due to the extent and the combinations involved. Unlike in years past, today’s children are faced with a greater number of fears and challenges than ever before: rapid technological progress, the threat of war, unemployment, inflation, rising health care costs, extremely high beauty standards, child molestation, a rise in the number and degree of violent crimes, rising divorce rates, etc. The list could go on forever but the point is that children today are faced with numerous challenges. How many of us worried about even half of the things on this list when we were growing up? Quite the contrary to our experiences, children and young adults today regularly worry about most of the things mentioned.
For instance, graduating from high school no longer guarantees that teens will get good jobs or be successful. In fact, great pressure is put on today’s students to begin preparing for college admission in elementary school, with the result that a grade of B can be a cause for tears if the child in the next seat gets an A. Most children are subjected to the pressures of standardized tests well before entering their junior year in high school, while some begin as early as middle school to plan their college majors.
Those who dream of getting married can no longer look forward to a “happily EVER after.” Quite the opposite, as more than half of those marrying will end up in divorce courts within a few years. Children and adolescents are well aware of this.
Now, think for a second about children’s schedules today (and it’s only recently that such words as “children” and “schedule” would have been written in the same sentence). In the past, childhood was a time of freedom and of “making one’s own fun.” By contrast, today’s children are shuffled from activity to activity (music lessons, scout meetings, team sports, religious education, private instruction in a variety of subjects, etc.) in an effort to make them well-rounded adults and give them an edge in applying to college. Little, if any, time is left over for children to simply entertain themselves. The leisure time left gets eaten up by television and computers, neither of which involve the kind of meaningful physical activity that contributes to a fit frame, while at the same time standards for physical beauty have never been higher, for both boys and girls.
Interestingly enough, the recent rise in—and fear of—obesity among children has promoted a “look good on the outside” mindset. Today, even infants are provided with designer clothing. Store shelves abound with children’s makeup, nail polish, cologne, “sexy” underwear for young children, and so forth. The pressure for children to “look good” has never been greater.
Add to all of this the current state of the American family. Even children in two-parent families are aware of the negative effects of divorce. It is no longer guaranteed that both parents will be in a child’s life on a daily basis. Yet, children’s television programs and movies are filled with images of supposedly “perfect” two-parent families, much as they have been for generations. Thanks to endless reruns, today’s children are exposed to the same unrealistically divorce-free, intact-family-celebrating programming that their grandparents viewed.
Take for example, the fact that on several cable stations you can regularly view the programs that were popular when the Baby Boomers were youngsters. These stations regularly air repeats of shows such as The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. Though neither family has traditional roots (the Bradys are a blended family, created after both partners were widowed, and the Partridges do not have a traditional father present) both have strong, nurturing male and female characters. In the case of the Bradys, both parents are regularly available for the children while the Partridges have a strong mother and a nurturing father figure (the family’s band manager). Neither program makes allowances for the absent mothers or fathers who have become realities in today’s children’s lives. The fact that such television families are far from universal is never explained to the children who make up much of the television audience. No wonder that many children feel there is something wrong with their own families when viewed alongside such models of togetherness. That feeling of not being “normal” or even “good enough” can add to a child’s stress.
A real-life example of using food to deal with the stress of divorce comes from Sean, a child who began to overeat after his parents divorced. After moving to a new house, starting a new school, and seeing his father only on weekends, Sean began to overeat and watch an excessive amount of television, resulting in the seven-year-old’s ballooning to ninety-six pounds at four feet tall.
“I think maybe I contributed to the weight thing because I was so emotionally stressed about this divorce,” says his mother, Val. “I wanted him to feel okay, so I didn’t deny him anything.” Because children began teasing him, Sean finally asked his mother to help him lose weight.
As if school and family stressors aren’t enough, crimes against children are on the rise. It wasn’t too long ago that new mothers simply left their babies sleeping in their car seats for a quick run into the store. Today, this notion sends shivers down the spines of parents everywhere—and rightly so. To