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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Even as they face these facts, today's enlightened parents (supported by their physicians) have attempted to follow advice like that given in the 1995 book "Let Them Eat Cake: The Case Against Overcontrolling What Children Eat." In it, pediatric nutritionist Ronald Kleinman and his co-writers Julie Houston and Michael Jellinek argue that parents have been overly concerned about children's eating habits. "The extreme standard of thinness that prevails today has no known health or medical benefits, but still it casts the idea of being moderately overweight, or even normal weight as a problem," write the authors. "Thin, heavy or average in stature, if a child is healthy, then the notion of acceptance by parents can not be overemphasized or overencouraged."
The result of this chastising, which has been reinforced by leading child-development experts, is that we find ourselves in a conspiracy of silence about children and weight: A word like "fat" must never be mentioned -- and not only because it is considered psychologically incendiary. Another reason is that "fat" has become a completely meaningless phrase: We know that 80 percent of girls think they are overweight -- even when they are not. So "fat" is now a word used to describe someone whose thighs (or tummy or butt or hips) are a few inches larger than is appropriate to fit into a Marc Jacobs minidress and look "hot." And the perversion of the word's meaning has made it almost impossible to distinguish, in discussions about weight, between being less than thin (i.e., normal weight) and being overweight, or even obese.
As the f-word has lost its currency in the parental vocabulary, well-intentioned media campaigns have attempted to make kids feel better about themselves, whatever their size may be, a strategy that conveys, sometimes unintentionally, the message that being fat is fit, that being fat is beautiful. (For example, the "Love Your Body" campaign launched by Anita Ruddick of the Body Shop during the mid-1990s, featured the famous "fat Barbie," reclining in an odalisque position, with the caption: "There are 3 billion women who don't look like supermodels and only eight who do.")
The most recent attempt to confront, and perhaps obliterate, the "skinny is beautiful" conundrum on the teen level was launched by Christina Kelly, editor in chief of ym magazine, one of the largest-circulation magazines for teen girls in the country. Kelly publicly resolved to ban diet articles and begin using plus-sized models in fashion spreads. "It was really important to me to take a stand," she says.
In fact, teen girls already are fluent in the body-positive, beauty-comes-in-all-sizes rhetoric of the last few decades, whether or not they read ym. A popular teen e-mail circulating the Internet, with the subject line "It's Beautiful Woman month," basically recapitulates the figures that a decade ago wouldn't have been seen outside of women's studies courses -- "Marilyn Monroe was a size 14! The average woman is 144 pounds and a size 10! Models in magazines are airbrushed -- not perfect!"
But even as they pay lip service to the feminist notion that beauty comes in different sizes in the abstract, many girls frequently enforce the retro skinny standard on themselves and their peers. On the ym message boards, for example, many girls were screaming for their diet and exercise articles and baiting girls for being fat. A typical example is the girl who wrote: No one gives a crap except for other fat people. So go form a support group and stop bothering everyone else. No one wants to look at a size 13 grl in a bikini."
And the irony is that, even as the perfect size 2 ideal is maintained by the daughters of feminist mothers, many of these same girls are fat. And they are protected in this interesting disconnect of intellect and obesity by parents who have no idea how to promote exercise and good eating as a health issue, without seeming to reinforce the notion that weight loss is necessary as an aesthetic issue.
Says Kelly, "I'm not opposed to exercise per se. But I want to keep the focus on the joy of doing the sport. I don't want to tell girls: Do this exercise and you will have a flat stomach, even if the byproduct of doing an exercise you enjoy may be a flat stomach."
Therein lies the conflict that intimidates so many parents who must reconcile the issue of self-esteem with the fact of fat. Many pediatricians and childhood dieting experts deal with the conundrum by encouraging parents to focus on the "fun" of exercise and good eating, and to always invoke the word "health," rather than focus explicitly on the goal of weight loss. Some, like Laura Walther Nathanson, the author of "Kidshapes," even go so far as to offer parents weird subterfuges to get out of directly addressing the issue of calories: She suggests, among other things, that parents confronted by children who want a Ding Dong should invoke the laxity of FDA regulations with regard to junk food, and maybe even gross them out by commenting on the potential conditions of the factories in which they are made.
