Overweight Child Promoting Fitness and Self Esteem

Introduction Come and sit with us on a bench outside an elementary school and watch the kids arriving on this spring morning. It's warm enough today that some of them are wearing shorts instead of track pants; some are walking, some are riding bikes, some are dropped off by their parents. We have a mixture of ethnic backgrounds here, and you can hear parents saying good-bye in several different languages.I can guarantee you that you'll also notice, if you watch for a little while, that children come in different shapes and sizes. See that group of seventh and eighth grade kids hanging around the baseball diamond? Some of the girls have been through puberty and are almost at their adult height; a few of the boys are tall, too, but most of them haven't yet had that growth spurt and they look surprisingly short beside the girls in their class.And now watch this group of girls walking into the schoolyard. Three of them are wearing shorts and T-shirts; the fourth is dressed in sweatpants and a loose sweater. It's obvious why, too: she's fatter than her friends, and even though she probably feels the heat more than they do, her desire to cover her body is stronger than her need to feel comfortable.She isn't the only child her size at this school. If you keep watching, you'll see many more -- and you'll notice some larger-than-average parents, too. just as any group of ten-year-olds will include some short ones, some tall ones and many in between, so children will range from thin to fat.The difference is that because of societal prejudices, being a fat child is a much more negative and painful experience than being a tall or short one. And it can be almost as painful for the parent who watches his or her child struggle against teasing from others, with the resulting damage to self-esteem. Parents worry, too, that the child will suffer serious health problems as a result of his or her weight.If you are the parent of one of those children, we hope in this book to offer you reassurance, solid information and practical suggestions.One of the things that has made this book difficult to write is the lack of neutral terms to describe the larger-than-average child. A smaller-than-average child can be slim, slender, slight, petite -- even thin or waif-like has positive connotations in today's society. But how do you write about the heavier child when every word that might be used has such strong negative connotations? Just listen to them -- fat, overweight, obese, heavy, chubby, husky.... Would you like to be described with any of those words? We remember hearing one child say that she was "fat-and-ugly" as though it were all one word. In addition, character traits are often linked to weight -- lazy, lacking willpower, slovenly, stupid. The words that refer to overweight are all ugly words.So how can we discuss this problem without a more neutral word to use? We've chosen, for the most part, to use "overweight" even though we don't like the connotations behind it -- that there is some perfect, ideal weight that every person of a certain height should achieve. We have plenty of research to share with you to show how wrong that concept is. But "overweight" seems to us to carry less of the intense negative baggage than other words like "fat" and "heavy."Our society is obsessed with weight and body size. This preoccupation is a serious problem. In a Chatelaine article on women's obsessions with thinness, the author, Suanne Kelman, interviews Jackqueline Hope, who is 5'7" and weighs 190 pounds. Hope feels comfortable and healthy at that weight and says, "I knew I was overweight but I really liked my body, and I couldn't understand why other people didn't. It was a pretty, Rubenesque body and it was mine, and I couldn't understand the hatred I would feel for it once I started to diePitman, Teresa is the author of 'Overweight Child Promoting Fitness and Self Esteem' with ISBN 9781552094747 and ISBN 155209474X.