The First Lady is getting her share of grief for mentioning her daughters while discussing obesity. ABC News reports in their article, Did Michelle Obama Send the Wrong Message With Obesity Comments?:
The first lady made the issue of healthy eating personal last week at an event in Alexandria, Va., where she kicked off a campaign addressing the issue of childhood obesity.
“We went to our pediatrician all the time,” Obama said. “I thought my kids were perfect — they are and always will be — but he [the doctor] warned that he was concerned that something was getting off balance.”
“I didn’t see the changes. And that’s also part of the problem, or part of the challenge. It’s often hard to see changes in your own kids when you’re living with them day in and day out,” she added. “But we often simply don’t realize that those kids are our kids, and our kids could be in danger of becoming obese. We always think that only happens to someone else’s kid — and I was in that position.”
It is my sense that the first lady should not have mentioned her own children in this debate. I don’t think she was trying to shame her kids publically. But by using them as an example to show other families she is in the same position they are, she is being insensitive to the fact that Sasha and Malia live in the worst kind of goldfish bowl — growing up with attention paid to their every move. Young girls are sensitive enough about their appearance without their schoolmates reading on the net that their Mom is worried about the size of their behinds.
I have personal experience with this, being on a diet since age 11. I always felt criticized at home for my baby fat and sensed I was being closely monitored. The result was a bad relationship with food that lasted for years. I have at one time been borderline anorexic and at other times, subject to binge eating. While I have been relatively slim my entire life, it took me until I was nearly 40 to forget about dieting (p.s., diets don’t work).
Oddly, when I no longer obsessed over what I ate, I started exercising regularly and ate what I felt like. I threw my scale in the trash. Checking the fit of my pants is good enough to see if I need to lay off the bread for a few days. It took 30 years to figure this out. At 51, I’m probably in the best shape of my life. And for the record, a mother clothes shopping for her daughter, making comments to the saleslady while her child is within earshot such as “Give her the next size, she needs it is the hips” is a killer.
Worry and fear creates the obsession. Making a child hyper aware of his or her weight and appearance can make food a drug of choice and grow any potential eating disorder into a worse problem than it might have been. A better answer is modeling good behavior. By setting an example for her girls without preaching about it, I wonder if a better result is possible. Girls are always worried about being compared unfavorably to their mothers. To feel like Mommy does not approve of them in some way is a recipe for disaster. I’m no shrink, but common sense tells me that when children feel loved and approved of for who they are, it is possible they will not require “a drug of choice” to hide in.
Laura Collins Lyster-Mensh, an eating disorder activist and executive director of Families Empowered and Supporting Treatment of Disorder (F.E.A.S.T.) pointed out the First Lady should discuss “behavioral change, not weight loss”:
“We’ve confused health and weight in a way that’s very confusing for children and very confusing for parents,” Lyster-Mensh said. “When we speak publicly about putting our children on a diet, we start to get into weight stigma and confusing the message to families.”
The focus on obesity, Lyster-Mensh said, turns this into an issue of appearances, which does not bode well for children, especially girls.
“There is simply no reason to be pushing children into weight reduction diets and that’s the message parents out there get,” Lyster-Mensh said. “Dieting is a gateway drug to eating disorders for those with a biological predisposition to eating disorders.”
I do not pretend there is an easy solution. Obesity is a huge problem in our country brought on partially by obsession with too many electronic toys that keep one sitting on one’s backside, too much junk food, and no P.E. Not to mention kids internalizing the family stress around them.
What do you think the First Lady should have done? What is a better solution here.
Remembering my own time as a “tweener” I never appreciated being discussed in front of other people by my parents as though I were an inanimate object or their possession. I think it would have been prudent for the First Lady to remember that in her quest to help a national problem, her children do not need to be a casualty of that discussion.