There's more to childhood
Another parental call for sanity by Jose Appleton: There’s more to childhood than counting calories
The obsession with expanding waistlines is narrowing horizons for children — and replacing adult guidance with health tips. Politicians, companies and charities are lining up together in the trenches in the war against childhood obesity....
Increasingly everything that children do is assessed with reference to body mass index...Good now equals active, low fat, and smaller waistline; bad equals inactive, full-fat and bulging belly.
Childhood obesity has become the bottom line justification for children’s activity....The need to combat obesity apparently also means that they should eat good food, and eat with their family at mealtimes. This signifies a profound narrowing of vision....Children’s activity is judged in terms of narrow goals and ends, the numbers of calories that it burns, rather than being seen as simply a normal party of everyday life, or as useful as an end in itself....
Increasingly children are encouraged to engage in ‘active lifestyle programmes’. The Department of Heath gave some children pedometers to measure the numbers of steps that they take in a day. Schoolchildren in
Although obesity is now the number one sin with which to scare children, it’s seen in peculiarly pragmatic terms. There is an obsession with measurement....Researchers are busily working out all the various ‘factors’ that influence childhood obesity....
These policies are in danger of breeding a new nation of self-obsessed gym goers, who are forever counting their steps and calorie intake. Kids shouldn’t be thinking about their weight, even - or perhaps especially - if they are fat...
There is more to childhood than not being fat....
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