to think this is the root of the obesity crisis?

[Somethingorotherorother]

It seems like on every single parenting thread, about bedtimes, sharing, behaviour, potty training etc there are huge numbers of people advocating bribing your child with food for good behaviour. Giving sweeties in the morning for every night a child stayed in bed. Sweeties for every poo on the potty. Sweeties for every day a child didn't bite their sibling. Sweeties for good behaviour at mealtimes. Sweeties for getting dressed in the morning.

Is it just me or is this absolutely batshit crazy!? People are suggesting this like it's a great way to get your kid to behave, but surely it just teaches them incredibly unhealthy eating habits (ie i deserve an edible reward for each unpleasant task) that carry in to adolescence and adulthood the idea that junk food is a normal part of the everyday diet?

It also strikes me as really lazy. Bribing a child with a pack of Haribo is much easier than, say, bribing a child with a fun outing or one-on-one time, which is what we used to get as kids for particularly good behaviour/achievements.

I read somewhere recently that 65% of UK adults are overweight, and tbh reading the way some people are bringing up their kids on here, i can't see that figure improving any time soon.

I haven't noticed people advocating bribing children with sweets.

I think the obesity crisis is down to a lifestyle that involves being driven most places, not having the freedom to roam as children, too much screen time, too much stress and an overly-processed diet with too much sugar and corn syrup.

Plus parents who don't have a healthy relationship with food to demonstrate in the first place.

@Stuckforthefourthtime

Yes, you have solved it. Not the massive decrease in cost of packaged food, nor the marketing spend of those companies, nor an economy that relies on most parents working and therefore often lacking time to cook from scratch / to take kids the long walk home / tired and guilty and more ready to bribe for good behaviour, nor a lack of healthy food shops but overabundance of fried chicken shops and corner shops in deprived areas, nor parents who often themselves were never taught to cook cheaply and nutritiously by their own parents or in school home economics lessons.

Nope, it's all the fault of parents trying to potty train.

This

I've only ever seen posts about offering 1 chocolate button when they have a poo on the toilet, I can't imagine that's going to tip many into obesity.

alsohuman My ds (12) will only drink water, he refuses anything else, unless he has a sore throat and then he'll drink warm lemon barley water.

Biscuits though, and pizza. He can eat his own body weight in those

I don't agree. I think obesity can be ascribed to a combination of the following (in no particular order):
i) Poverty/ignorance/lack of education
ii) Availability of cheap, processed foods
iii) Sedentary lifestyle
iv) Super-sized helpings of everything that skew the perception of normal
v) Disconnect between the food we eat and where it comes from
vi) Reluctance to pay for proper food
vii) (Whispers) Supermarkets and their propensity to stock enormous amounts of ready-made meals and fewer of the fresh ingredients

Generally obese babies, when the parents aren’t tall (and white), happen because the mum is overweight or obese or not eating healthily

The fattest babies I knew (think 12-14lbs) are all now really skinny adults.

Yes a couple of them had tall parents (only one is white)
One little girl who her parents described as a bouncy ball because of how podgy she was couldn’t be filled and was eating adult portions at 2 years old is now taller than both her parents and is very slim.

We are the short white overweight/obese parents both dc are taller than us and slim

I’m guilty of this. Sweets for a poo in the potty. And sweets as a pudding on the odd occasion.
I’d like to think it’s a balance. They also know they can have unlimited fruit and we talk about why we shouldn’t have too much sugar and the negatives of doing so.
Hopefully they’ll grow up with a normal approach to food.

We grew up without much money and I’ll always remember my Dad’s payday stuffing myself stupid with food. I’ve always had a shit relationship with food so I hope that by allowing my kids sweets reasonably regularly it’ll stop that binge mentality.

Who knows? We are all trying our best right? I doubt there are many parents who don’t care about their children’s diet or who think it’s fine to have loads of sweets everyday.

Meh, I bribed my DC with chocolate buttons when potty training, but not for every single achievement, and also only one or two buttons at a time. I think it's important to learn to have a small amount of chocolate/sweets and that they are a treat. That's what I've aimed for and my DC now a teen and a preteen are not overweight, in fact they are very slim. However I know that there are multiple factors in that - genetics, availability of healthy food, and my income/class that means I can afford fresh healthy food, have been taught how to make it, and have time to make it. Many factors.

However IMO one of the biggest factors in the obesity crisis is actually artificial sweeteners and diet foods, and massive misunderstandings about sugar and other aspects of nutrition. I often had sweets when I was a child - my kids have sweets - but we need to keep sugar consumption in moderation without replacing it with artificial sweeteners. Not because they are evil poisons in some kind of woo sense, but because they affect your body's ability to cope with sugar and make you crave more sugar.

Sweets aren't the enemy, sugar isn't the enemy, it's just a food we don't need that much of.

I personally think bribing a 2.5 year old to do a wee in the potty can hardly be blamed as the "root of the obesity crisis"!

I think it runs considerably deeper than that. :)

We did the chocolate buttons as a reward in potty training. It worked and they didn’t turn into obese children. A bigger problem is the snacks given when they get out of school. Much better that they are taught to eat all their lunch and then a proper meal in the evening.

Easy access to cheap, processed foods in 24 hour cultures. Centrally heated houses (better to be a bit on the cold side as it happens). Cars - which begat more cars and then made it less safe to travel round by foot or bike. And so on and so forth. Biologically evolved to fill up in times of plenty (but much of the world no longer have the famine periods).

Though the mortality studies show the upper end of normal BMI and slightly overweight have best outcomes in terms of lifespan than either those who are obese or underweight.

Like a previous poster, I lived in a family where sweets, sugary cereals, white bread and anything unhealthy wasn’t allowed in the house. Like the pp I too ate junk wherever I could find it. I stashed it, I binged on it and have been morbidly obese with bad food issues since I was 14.

It seems like on every single parenting thread, about bedtimes, sharing, behaviour, potty training etc there are huge numbers of people advocating bribing your child with food for good behaviour
Parenting threads on here or parenting threads on another forum?
I've never seen anyone advocating this as a way to reward various things - please do link to some threads so we can read them ourselves.

Even if there are some people who do this (there are a couple of people on this thread now saying that they have done it) I don't think this is the root cause of the obesity crisis at all.
Obesity is caused by a number of factors.
I know that in my own case (I was a bit overweight before the Corona crisis began) the main cause of the extra pounds was not having the time to prepare food properly and having to grab something on the go (eg. sandwich from a supermarket) when rushing about. I've always cooked properly from scratch at home when I've had the time. The difference has been that during Corona, every single meal has been homemade and I've had no supermarket sandwiches and pasta salads or similar. I've dropped all the excess pounds.
So I think hectic lifestyles are one issue as are pre-packaged foods - ready meals and that sort of thing.
For others it is a poverty issue - not being able to afford good quality ingredients. Look how cheap some unhealthy foods are. People on low incomes often have to fill up on things like very cheap pasta and I think pasta piles the weight on if you're not careful.

It’s equally disturbing that you’d see “one on one” time with your child as a “reward”

What stuck says.

If anyone remembers the children's comic charcter Billy Bunter, this article from the British Medical Journal is quite funny, but also, sadly, all too true:
www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a2877.full

There's a lot of snacking encouraged on here tbh. Not sure about a cause of obesity but it is 100% evidence linked to dental disease.

The obesity epidemic is much more due to the vast amounts of sugar and salt in processed food that is specifically designed to be addictive. In my view, solving the problem requires government regulation of the food industry.

I personally think food companies have a lot to do with it. Look at your food labels and they’ll give you a calculation for 250ml in a 2 litre bottle or 90g portion info for a 700g pack etc.
They don’t give the full nutritional content for the whole product because it would put people off buying it.

Yes you are right. As someone who works in this area these behaviours have been identified as barriers to improving child health and are very much entrenched in our culture. We encourage swapping food reward & distractions for activities such as singing a song or nursery rhyme together & giving favourite toy. The problem is this doesn't work very well in public settings such as buses & supermarkets so in these circumstances we encourage bringing out bubbles (great for performance parenting if that's what you're into), books and screens.
What doesn't work is judgement of parents e.g. labelling as "lazy" (more often than not they're copying what they know form previous generations) and ignoring the context in which the parenting is taking place.

I should add, the other suggestions by PP are also contributing factors, there is no one cause of obesity. The context in which the parenting is taking place (e.g. availability of fresh food, green spaces, social norms, no of fast food restaurants) is crucial.

It certainly doesn't help to teach kids that food is a reward.

That said, in my opinion the obesity is usually caused by either denial or self-hatred.

I've been obese on and off since I was a child. I fall firmly into category 2. I've hated the way I look since I was at nursery and have to fight the urge to self sabotage and to fight to think I'm even worth treating with anything like kindness. It's hard to strive for well being when you feel like a piece of shit and food is a short-term comfort.

Most of my obese friends fall into this category, but some are just clueless re calories/nutrition and are in complete denial about their size. They simply do not see themselves as very big at all.

As a secondary teacehr, I think the best thing that would help would be better education re nutrition and cooking from key stage 1, the biological effects of obesity in Science at KS3 and onwards and teaching kids about the negative effects of the diet industry/ how to manage their TDEE/Macros & exercise for optimum weight and health.

I know lots of people are very anti the current trend to normalise obesity (it makes me very uncomfortable too) BUT if paired with an honest conversation about caloric management & exercise and a message of self worth it really could make a difference.

There's a difference between one Haribo as a reward and a whole packet.

I agree, giving sweets does teach the 'sweet things = reward = feeling good about self' mindset, but a small amount of sweet things aren't going to cause obesity. Sitting down all day, driving everywhere and being 'too tired' to exercise is going to cause obesity, as well as cheap, high calorie low nutrition food.

@QueenOfPain

It’s equally disturbing that you’d see “one on one” time with your child as a “reward”

Exactly this. One on one time with my children is standard, not a reward.

I think it's way more complicated than that.

Reasons including less exercise overall, far more access to cheap, high calorie foods, more eating out, less time/ability to cook, supersized portions and many more factors.

It's strange though because I went to school in the 80s/90s and we were the generation of sugary cereals, biscuits for snacks, ready meals. I'd often go to school with a sandwich, a wagon wheel and a small bottle of fizzy pop. Yet there seemed to be very few overweight people around.

But I wonder if our generation were the start of it.

No, it goes so beyond that.

A few generations ago, men had mostly physical labour type jobs. The woman would deskin and prep a chicken, and scrub the potatoes and vegetables, wash clothes by hand, kids would be outside playing all day long, they'd walk everywhere....

Nowadays, we can get in our car and drive to a nearby Costa drove through, then order takeaway to come to our door, order a weeks grocery shop to be delivered, throw some chips and pizza into the oven....

Just one example. Add in stress, mental health, long working hours, food available everywhere...there are so many variables!