Ah, Meowzer, your fat fu is strong, my web friend.
Meowzer's post explains in a tidy, beautifully composed nutshell exactly what I have spent countless hours discussing with my own mother lately, namely, that kids come in all shapes and sizes naturally and that efforts to mold and shape them into something that they aren't (read: skinny) will only result in longterm disorders and a helluva lot of guilt and grief for both mother and child:
C’mon, guys, cough it up. You know the truth. You know this “childhood obesity epidemic” is a bunch of trumped-up hooha, that kids are maybe, on average, ten pounds heavier and an inch taller than a generation ago. Poor children, particularly the children of the working poor who don’t qualify for government assistance, do seem to be in worse health all the time, because their lives and their families’ lives are measurably more stressful, their health care is a joke and their food and exercise options are an even worse joke. (Which is not to say that those who do qualify for government assistance have it great either, but at least they get a little help.) That is the real “childhood health crisis” in America, not the youthful spare tires of middle-class and upper-class kids.
But gaaaah, if we concentrated on that we’d be taking all your fun away by depriving you of the opportunity to bash uppity middle-class-and-richer women for thinking they actually have the right to have lives, who think they actually have the right to eat what they want and not spend every spare moment they have slaving over a hot stove and sitting with their children for five hours at the dinner table every night “making them” eat their kohlrabi. I wish more of these women would see these stupid-ass “lifestyle stories” for the antifeminist, regressive guiltbaggery that they are. They know damn well you can’t “make” kids eat vegetables, that even if you could, that doesn’t mean the kids will carry that habit with them into adulthood, and that even kids who like vegetables often wind up fat.
She's writing in response to a widely circulated AP study that found that all of the gazillions of "lifestyle interventions" we've been perpetrating on American kids for the past decade have resulted in more or less fuck all. Of course, they define the fuck-all-ed-ness in large part because kids have failed to get any skinnier. What would make them think that getting naturally fat kids to be thin is any easier than doing the same for naturally fat adults is an open question. (Or vice versa--let's not forget that the preponderance of the evidence shows that it is also nearly impossible to make a naturally thin person fat.)
As always, the caveats. I do think that far too many kids eat crappy food. It's easy, it's widely available, and it's cheap. And I think a lot of kids probably play more videogames and watch more TV than they should. Again, it's easier than fighting it. But I will argue strenuously that crappy food and too much quality time between kids' butts and their couches occurs with just as much frequency among thin kids as fat. And that should be the concern, because that's where some changes can be made.
I shouldn't have to scour the labels of my English muffins and whole-wheat bread and applesauce to avoid high-fructose corn syrup. I shouldn't have to take my life in my hands to take my son for a walk in a neighborhood with no sidewalks and badly enforced speed limits. And I shouldn't have to explain a thousand times over that a person can eat healthily, exercise, and raise happy, healthy kids and still be fat. Or that the mothers of fat kids aren't driving from fast-food restaurant to fast-food restaurant to feed their kids while they vegetate to the in-car DVD entertainment system. It's not all Twinkies and America's Next Top Model here, people.
You see, I'm ranting again. Go read Meowzer. She's a lot more cogent.