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It’s no secret that Americans are fat. We like to eat and we live in a society where large amounts of food are readily available. During the 20th Century, the average weight of the college age male rose from 133 pounds to 166 pounds. When I graduated from college in 1996, I weighed 228 pounds. The average weight of the college age female has also risen–from 122 pounds to 144 pounds.
As scary as these stats seem, there’s another set of stats, from a different age group that scares me even more. As a parent–a fat parent of thin kids–I worry a lot that my kids will turn out fat as well. If you’re a regular reader here, you’ll know from my introduction that one of my main reasons for getting fit slowly is to be a better example for my two children.
You’d think it would be hard for kids to get fat. They have high metabolisms, grow a lot, and are generally very active. But the numbers aren’t good:
In 1971 only 4% of 6-to-11-year-old kids were obese; by 2004, the figure had leaped to 18.8%. In the same period, the number rose from 6.1% to 17.4% in the 12-to-19-year-old group, and from 5% to 13.9% among kids ages just 2 to 5. And as with adults, that’s just obesity. Include all overweight kids, and a whopping 32% of all American children now carry more pounds than they should.
Since I’ve been worrying about this of late, I’ve come up with a list, that is by no means complete, of some ideas to help parents help their kids maintain a healthy weight. I’d love to hear more ideas from those of you who are parents and have ideas that work for your family.
- Limit “Screen Time”–Television and the internet make it real easy to be lazy. Most American kids spend an average of three hours per day in front of the computer or TV–and that’s after they’ve been stuck behind their desk in school all day.
- Make the family meal a priority–With soccer and ballet, karate and PTA meetings, it’s tough to find the time to eat dinner together with your kids. But if you don’t provide a nutritious meal, and be around to eat it with them, they’re going to fall back on unhealthy choices.
- Be an active family–Everyone likes to go to the movies. But don’t forget about all the fun you can have outdoors. Go for a hike, a bike ride, or play soccer at the park. Weed the garden, mow the lawn, or trim the bushes together. Get the whole family out of the house as often as possible and you just might talk more too
My kids are still real young, but already I see in them the allure of TV and the internet. My daughter loves to watch “Sesame Street” Clips on Youtube. She also enjoys taking digital pictures and reviewing them on the computer. She would watch as much TV as I let her. But she also loves being outside, playing with her friends, and riding her tricycle. It’s up to me to help her make the right choices that will keep her healthy and active. I’m not a perfect example for my kids. I’m still overweight and I still watch more TV than I should. But I’m getting smaller, and exercising in front of them often. I can only hope that what they see me doing now will help them develop a love for being active and healthy.
The statistics and photo for this post was taken from an article entitled: How America’s Children Packed On the Pounds.
J.D.
13 responses so far ↓
1 Leah // Jun 18, 2008 at 6:38 am
I think that being a good example is the best way to go. Then, get your kids involved in what you’re doing. Have them go for a jog with you (maybe a short run for you?). Get them outside to weed the garden with dad, and it is stealth exercise! As the parents change family priorities, vacations might involve hiking, swimming, etc and daily life might work in little bits of activity wherever possible.
I don’t have kids (yet), but I certainly do intend to be a good role-model by staying active and making sure my kids stay active with me.
2 COD // Jun 18, 2008 at 7:01 am
At an early age, help your kids find physical activities that they enjoy and then encourage them and be as supportive as possible. It’s possible that your kids may pick something like equestrian or competitive gymnastics that directly conflicts with Getting Rich Slowly. You’ll just have to deal with it, at least until they are 18 and you can turn the expense over to them 100%
Also, kids eat what their parents serve them. There is no magic in serving healthy balanced meals. If you do so regularly, it’s likely your kids won’t even like McDonalds. We use the threat of dinner at McDonald’s as a joke punishment.
Absent any genetic or health issues that lead to weight gain, moderate exercise and mostly healthy meals is 99% of the battle. It’s not rocket science.
3 Morquea // Jun 18, 2008 at 7:24 am
I agree with Leah about getting your kids involved in what you’re doing. This is how my father keep my brother and me healthy. Make physical activities a family activity. As a kid, we did cross-country skiing twice a week during winter and a bicycle ride twice a week two without counting the ride of the weekwend (often combined with camping). But, make sure that in the long run that physical activity becomes their choice so that when they begin to live their own life, they continu living to those standards. The best way is always that they think that its fun.
That program drops as I was a teenager cause my dad became a huge snowmobil adept. But still, I was playing street hockey after school, playing soccer twice a week and had training saturday morning and use my bike as a mean of transportation around town. My brother was following the same pattern except for the huge afterschool snack… he suffer obesity despite all this. Must have fall to the small percentage who are fat cause of metabolic factor.
My university years were catastrophic cause I bought a car, was big on computer gaming and tabletop role-playing games. Most of my friend of this era were not very sporty. I gain 80 pounds in four years.
The good news is that I’m going back to those activities of my childhood : biking, skiing, jogging, soccer, hockey, etc. I’m drived mostly by nostalgia, prideness and a new social network where kayak, marathon, mountain bike competion, soccer, hunting, fishing, etc are the most frequent topics of conversation.
So, to make a long story short, build an active social network around your kids an be the center of it.
4 brad // Jun 18, 2008 at 7:51 am
The biggest challenge, I think, is in the teenage years. Many kids stop seeing their parents as role models and in fact may purposefully take on behaviors that contradict those that their parents are trying to encourage. Believe me, I speak from experience
My 19-year-old stepdaughter makes no secret that she does everything she can to be different from us. She refuses to eat anything organic, buys her own commercial laundry detergent so she can avoid using our “green” brand, won’t eat anything we eat and lives on junk food she buys herself, eats a green vegetable once or twice a year, and steadfastly resists any exercise. She takes a cab or the bus rather than walking even 1/4 of a mile. Fortunately for her she has a fast metabolism and weighs less than 85 pounds, despite going through half a stick of butter every day and living mainly on a diet of hot dogs, ice cream, fries, and Uncle Ben’s minute rice.
She might be an extreme case, but I do think you have to treat adolescents differently because in most cases they’re not looking to you as a role model anymore. It’s their friends that you have to influence, and that’s no easier.
5 another leanne // Jun 18, 2008 at 9:19 am
Three thoughts:
I agree that making family mealtime important is a very wise thing, especially with smaller kids in the house. But I’ve come to realize that it isn’t always realistic to peg DINNER as the family meal and from the various articles and studies I’ve read, it seems that any meal together can have benefits. For some families, it may make more sense to plan to have breakfast together regularly (which also reinforces the habit of eating breakfast, a thing that most dietitians recommend for folks trying to maintain a healthy weight).
Second, there’s a lot to be said for making healthy food convenient and easy, especially for kids. I have my issues with those baby carrots that aren’t really baby carrots (and what do they do with all the carrot shavings that are taken off to give them that baby carrot shape?) but the truth is that I eat way more “baby” carrots than I ever did when I was buying full size carrots I had to cut up into sticks. Ditto divvying up those carrots into smaller snack-size bags and stashing them in the fridge. When we head out for a bike ride with our son, if the bag-o-baby-carrots is ready to go, I’m much more likely to grab that than to grab the package of graham crackers.
Third, Brad, I absolutely believe that every body is different, meaning that the averages don’t always apply, but to be perfectly honest, reading that your 19-year-old stepdaughter weighs less than 85 pounds makes me hope she is really really short (because if she’s not, that seems like an unrealistically low weight!)
6 Rachel // Jun 18, 2008 at 9:37 am
One of the biggest things my family has started to do is cut out high fructose corn syrup and for that matter processed foods. It seems when we eat less processed foods both myself and my husband lose weight.
Also, my daugther who is 2 loves when we make smoothies for her. It is a great way for us to make sure she gets in her fruits and veggies. To top it off it tastes great.
7 brad // Jun 18, 2008 at 9:51 am
Leanne, she’s fairly short (about 5′2″), and her mother has the same physique, so I think it’s genetic. Still, one of her doctors thought she might be anorexic and she’s been going to the clinic for followup. She has been trying to gain weight for years. She’s an extremely type A personality who flies off the handle at the slightest provocation, so I think she just burns off all her calories with nervous energy.
8 Lisa // Jun 18, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Maybe my town was weird, but I biked to school virtually everyday from elementary school through high school. (It probably helped that my town didn’t have a school bus system and I was always fairly close to school <3miles). Anyways- I didn’t realize until I got older that it was such a simple (and unconcious) way to get some exercise. That built in with family meals and packed lunches, made healthy habbits without much effort.
9 elisabeth // Jun 19, 2008 at 6:46 am
my sweet husband grew up with indulgent parents — he has fond memories of eating whole bags of potato chips washed down with bottles of Royal Crown cola after dinner, and lots of similar indulgences.
My mother was quite the opposite: “no soda except on special occasions,” and no between-meal snacks and she controlled the size of dessert (i.e. one cookie!). And I walked to school, even though my father was the principal.
But it kind of backfired. When I met my husband, I had a terrible diet — hated vegetables and drank pop every day. He, on the other hand, was a carrot craver and daily exerciser. Things are a little better now but I’m still the one tossing the Cheeze-its into the shopping cart, and trying to get fit slowly…
I can’t blame my parents, and I don’t think my choices were made to spite them, it was more that I hadn’t had junk foods (not even a tv dinner — my mother was a stay-at-home mom who cooked) and as someone buying my own food I gravitated to what seemed exotic (frozen food!) and formerly forbidden….
10 brad // Jun 19, 2008 at 11:10 am
Elisabeth, I hear you on that! My stepmother was a control freak, and when I was growing up in the 1970s the world was just learning about the dangers of cholesterol. She used those fears as an excuse to sharply curtail all cholesterol consumption in the house: eggs were strictly forbidden, and I was only allowed to drink powdered skim milk. When I left home for university, I hadn’t eaten an egg in nearly 10 years, and it took me a few months to come to the realization that I was now free to eat eggs if I wanted to. I cooked up a couple and thought, ugh, I wasn’t missing so much after all, but then one of my roommates pointed out that eggs taste a lot better if you put salt and pepper on them. From that point on I was addicted
11 Pat Blanks - EasyDietMeals.com // Jun 19, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Nice post.
I totally agree that teenage obesity is a serious issue and a growing problem. But with some smart healthy habits like cutting short television time, intake of balance diet and having some physical activities in family time can make a difference.
12 greenman2001 // Jun 19, 2008 at 3:18 pm
“I still watch more TV than I should”
I’ve never understood this statement. It’s like saying “I nap too much.” The idea that relaxing in front of the tv is bad for you mystifies me. I think there’s a Calvanist ethic at work here: if you’re not doing something, it must be bad for you. Mac: you’re a stay-at-home Dad, you work hard, it’s okay to put your feet up and watch some tv.
Or maybe you have a bigger problem with it than you’re letting on.
That said, it can be gone from your life completely in 90 seconds. It’s a habit that’s there for a reason, and shrugging and saying merely “I watch more tv than I should” conceals it’s purpose in your life, whatever that may be. You keep it for a reason, and that reason is probably a good one, difficult to satisfy through other means without making big, difficult, painful changes.
My experience is that people’s “bad habits” are usually very effective, very efficient means of getting important needs met. You should celebrate your ability to do this in a harmless way, Mac. (Unless it’s not harmless.)
I don’t own a TV. But I definitely talk more than I should.
13 Sibling Day Weekend Roundup | Health, Fitness, Exercise, and Weight Loss (53 pounds in 9 weeks) // Jun 22, 2008 at 6:47 am
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