When it comes to your kid's weight, does the truth hurt?

by Martha Edwards (Subscribe to Martha Edwards's posts)
Sep 9th 2008 7:42PM

No one likes to hear bad things about their child. But what if it's the truth ... and their health depends on it?

What I'm talking about, of course, is your child's weight. Studies show that of parents of overweight kids, only 39% recognized that their child was overweight while 61% believed their child was a normal weight. But should parents be told the truth about their child's weight? Some believed that telling the parents could have adverse consequences. Until now, that is. Experts are finally agreeing that it's not harmful to be honest when it comes to such a weighty subject.

It's about time, if you ask me. Parents should know that their kids face potentially fatal health risks if they don't change their habits. But that's just my opinion -- what do you think?

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

bob 9-18-2008 @ 11:08AM

Great post, keep up the good work!

TorrentEye: http://www.torrenteye.com

... 9-26-2008 @ 5:15PM

I think parents need to be informed. However, I believe just giving the assessment of "overweight" is a very poor shortcut and doesn't give sufficient information. Doctors see lots of patients every day, and they use lots of statistical averages and shortcuts to guess whether someone they see maybe once per year(?) is overweight or not. My partner has a high BMI because he pumps iron two hours a day, so Kaiser's nurse practitioners and automated mailing system all keep telling him that he should lose weight. Other than his enormous muscles, he has significantly less body fat than I do, and my doctor's office tells me that my weight is fine (BMI 23).

I think doctors should educate parents about their children's weights, what all the numbers mean, what the future implications are. However, I think taking shortcuts and merely saying that a child is overweight does more harm than good. We are each individual people. We live differently and behave differently from the fictitious statistically average human that medicine base generalized recommendations on. (For example, no real human has exactly 2.5 children.) Doctors are useful because they're highly educated people, so they have a lot of information we don't, but they can't apply medical knowledge very well to us because they don't see us very often. We see ourselves (and hopefully our children) all the time, so we should be better at applying general medical knowledge to our specific lives if we had the knowledge to begin with. I think any good doctor's office should include a patient educator that will sit down with the patients and explain everything in lay terms that we can all understand. Whether the doctors do the patient education themselves or leave it to someone who speaks our language, I think the education aspect of visiting the doctor becomes more and more valuable as we aspire to stay healthy longer.