Childhood Eating Disorders
Childrens Eating ProblemsI wish I didn't have to write a page on preventing childhood eating disorders. I find it tragic that I do, girls as young as five are now turning up with eating disorders. And childhood eating disorders are on the rise. It's hardly surprising in a Western culture; obsessed with weight, looks and appearance and yet has high calorie fast food junk joints marketed falsely to the kids market as 'cool'. I'm writing this page on preventing on childhood eating disorders because whenever I've done workshops, as I relate in my book about preventing childhood obesity, I've been bombarded with desperate mothers telling me about their children who "hate vegetables, are food-refusing or picky eaters, who only want to eat junk food, who are fat (even when, often, their pictures tell me a different story), or who have an eating disorder. The most common phenomenon I’ve seen at my workshops is mothers’ fears that their children – especially their daughters – might become fat like them. ‘Fat?’ I think, looking at yet another svelte and glamorous mother as I inwardly shake my head at the culture that has them believing that." The younger your child, the greater is your influence in their life. Five year old girls who have mothers who diet: know much more about dieting than are girls whose mothers don’t diet. develop body issues earlier than their peers, are twice as likely as their peers to go on diets, and at younger ages than their friendsand are more likely to develop eating disorders and later weight problems (Abramovitz and Birch). I remember watching The Tyra Banks Show and was horrified at an eight-year-old going on about her thunder thighs when in reality she was as skinny as anything! And when Tyra spoke to the mothers it was quite obvious these young girls were merely modeling their mothers habits and attitudes. Childhood Eating Disorders
Girls vs BoysVastly more girls than boys succumb to eating disorders - anorexia and bulimia - than boys. I believe it can be blamed partly on the ‘thinness = sexy and desirable = catch the most successful mate paradigm. This in turn means that vastly more mother-role models diet and have eating disorders than father's do. But it’s also partly because girls eating habits are meddled with at earlier ages because many parents have greater fears and anxieties about the bodies of their daughters than those they have about their sons. Sadly though, with the change in male role models, the rise of the metra-seuxal male who is into grooming and appearance and the changing male body image, boys are starting to fall prey to eating disorders as well and at progressively earlier ages. As I point out in my book about preventing childhood obesity, eating disordered mothers, also the mothers who most strongly buy into Westernized body and dieting beliefs are much more concerned about their two-year-old daughters’ weight than about the weight of their sons. And in research where these children were followed from birth to five, mothers with eating disorders had daughters (but not sons) who fed more greedily early in their development, had difficulty weaning from the bottle and vomited more frequently. Being desperate for their daughters not to follow in their footsteps, they unwittingly did all the things that are vastly more likely to promote eating and body problems (Woolley, Wheatcrost and Stein). In addition, restriction and deprivation (central to dieting), it turns out, are the biggest predictors of eating disorders. Mothers who restrained their eating also used more food restriction with their daughters. And their daughters (but not their sons) started dieting earlier, and had more eating disorders. These early gender differences account for another part of why more young girls and women than young boys and men have eating disorders, and why there are girls with eating disorders at progressively younger ages, sometimes as young as five. However, I predict that as the demands for a beefed up and toned male body increase, progressively more boys will develop body dissatisfaction at increasingly earlier ages, which will stimulate behaviours such as earlier dieting, gymming and steroid-taking. Ultimately, there will be a vastly increased incidence of body dysmorphia (known more commonly as bigorexia) and eating disorders amongst boys. Cultural Requirements
and childhood eating disordersIt’s not only gender differences but cultural ones that determine if a child is likely to develop an eating disorder. Where a woman's ideal body size is larger than the ideal Westernized ideal, a mother, would be more likely to rate her daughter as ‘ideal’ if the child was chubbier. Just these differing perceptions would influence how the two different mothers might feed their children, and what kinds of messages those children would received about the acceptability of their bodies.Another factor is that with younger children surfing the web, access to sites known as 'pro anna' (pro anorexia) where gauntness and thinness are glamorized introduces girls to the idea that this extreme thinness is attractive and something to be admired. Aish! Another growing trend in the Western world is a movement back towards organic and Orthorexia Nervosa.
 If you find the ditch-diets-live-light website useful, please recommend it to your friends.  |  |  |  |  | |
Best Weight
Products | Your opinion for
a free e.course | | Your Story/Poem
& Feedback | Our community
& newsletter |
Love this page - please help by using the buttons below to Stumble or Buzz it up! And please let me know you buzzed it up by mailing me here and I'll send you my complimentary THANK YOU e.course. You'll love it!
|
Subscribe to Weightloss tips
