They Say: Parents Don’t Care If Boys Get Fat

A study that set out to determine whether restricting what and how much your child eats would eventually lead to obesity (it doesn’t; more on that in a second) uncovered a dirty little secret:

Parents care more about keeping their daughters skinny than letting their sons get fat.

That actually came as no surprise to me and probably not you either. We’ve all witnessed something like this: people admiring a “growing boy” as he shovels it in at Sizzler, but eating in silence (or looking away) as the family’s teen girl heads back for another round of desserts.

From eScienceNews:

“Our findings mirror those of other studies that have found that parents are much less likely to recognise or be concerned about the overweight status of sons compared to daughters,” says [lead author Kyung E. Rhee, MD, MSc, a researcher with the Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center at The Miriam Hospital]. “These behaviours may represent a sensitivity to societal values that girls should be slim while boys have a physical or social advantage in being larger.”

Anyway, the study, which appears in the journal Obesity, is good news for parents who never really bought into the idea that kids can exercise portion control when facing an open bag of cookies.

Instead, researchers learned that controlling what and how much your kids eat between the ages of 4 and 7 leads to a healthier BMI between 7 and 9 years old. (No word on whether these restrictions lead to eating disorders, but, hey! At least the kids aren’t fat!)

Here’s a summary of the study from the LA Times:

Researchers studied 789 boys and girls in nearly equal numbers, calculating changes in their body mass index between the ages of 4 and 7, and7 and 9, to determine how their mothers’ restrictive feeding
affected how much weight they gained — or didn’t gain. The data were from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s study of early child care and youth development.

Mothers were also asked, “Do you let your child eat what he/she feels like eating?” Answers were scored on a four-point scale, from “definitely no” to “mostly no,” “mostly yes,” and “definitely yes.”

They found no correlation between a rise in mothers controlling their kids’ eating in the early age range and weight gain in the later range. So it’s OK to say, “no dessert tonight!” But spank yourself if you’re telling your girl one thing and your boy another.

Photo: agooddietforteens.com