Read The flip side of the obesity crisis: How some US parents are putting their babies on diets...Not news to me.A few things were missing in my quick reading (I am digging out from a few days of illness...)1) If the daughter had indeed been larger than average, this mothers efforts would likely have been applauded, even though restricting a child who is lean or fat is damaging. Their seems to be the "tsk, tsk" reaction because the child is already skinny. If the little girl was "obese," the article would have a different tone, "tsk, tsk! This mom needs to control her daughter's portions, push fruits and vegetables, limit carbs, and not have the junk food in the house! (In other words, are these feeding behaviors OK for some kids and not others?)2) The doctors come out smelling like roses, when in fact, many, many doctors are recommending that parents restrict infants and small children. Is it any better if the child is two, and a nutritionist is writing out calorie limits and portion control?3) This mother's efforts to spare her daughter from weight and esteem struggles are almost a guarantee that her daughter will have some kind of struggle with eating, weight, esteem. Moms who themselves struggle with food, weight, dieting, disinhibited eating are more likely to restrict their children, and our current hysteria about obesity reinforces this tendency.4) There was no mention of optimal feeding, analysis of child growth/BMI, of not trying to feed to control weight, of the Division of Responsibility...As adults, most of our efforts to control, maintain or lose weight- if it means eating in a way that is designed to eat less than we might want is a diet and is nearly-universally a failure.Why should it be any different for our children?I'm reading another book about binge eating in adults (review to come soon) and it backs up what I have read in other articles. paraphrase: the earlier someone begins to diet, the more disordered their eating is as an adult. Now we're talking about 4, 5, 7 month old babies. Argh!Thoughts?
