With a quarter of Aussie kids now overweight or obese and thousands of others battling eating disorders, mum-of-two Zoe Arnold asks if it’s possible to raise kids with no body image hang-ups.
Fat kids are becoming normal, just like fat adults. Visit any suburban mall and overweight families appear to outnumber average-sized people.
But what about the other extreme?
Kids who are so obsessed with how they look that they stop eating. They compare themselves to Barbies — wondering why their waists aren’t as small.
This is also happening in Australia.
A friend of mine has a gorgeous eight-year-old daughter. She’s slim and healthy, and isn’t quite old enough to know about body image. But she’s not far off.
Last year, children in the year above her stopped eating their school lunches en masse. Parents couldn’t work out why sandwiches were coming home, still packed neatly in cling wrap. Turns out one little girl was telling others in her class that they were ‘fat’ or ‘skinny’ and her fellow nine-year-olds were taking her seriously.
Surely nine is too little to be worried about appearances?
But we are getting fatter. And fatter.
So how do we educate our kids about what to eat, how much to consume, without giving them a complex about the size of their waistlines?
I encourage healthy eating at home. I serve vegetables with all my kids’ meals, and dish up fruit with their snacks. They’re not always eaten, but I figure the more it’s presented, the more it’s consumed.
We eat treats too: small packets of sweet biscuits, milkshakes at cafés, ice creams on hot days.
My three-year-old knows that too much cake is bad for you, just like she knows smoking is yucky. But I don’t want her worrying that she’s going to have a weight problem every time she chows down a piece of birthday cake.
So how do you achieve that balance? How do you educate your kids about being healthy without driving them to an unrealistic ideal of skinniness? Or at the other end of the scale — prevent them from becoming obese, like too many of us are?
It’s tricky, and with two daughters I think my work’s cut out for me. Obesity can be caused by genetics. My Grandmother was obese, as was one of her sisters — the other three were thin as rakes, and they all had the same depression-era diet … long before fast food became a staple.
Most obese people are not fat because of the genes though. It’s what they eat. And eat, and eat. So for my part, I will try to keep my kids on a balanced diet, keep giving them their fruit and veg every day.
I can only hope they grow up knowing healthy is beautiful, and while they may not be supermodel skinny, they learn to love their strong and capable bodies.
What about you? How do you teach your kids to be healthy, without going too far?
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