to ask why would you overfeed your child?

[ineedtoknowwhy]

I'm sure this question has been asked before but, please, can someone explain to me why would a parent overfeed an already obese child?

Every day when I drop my daughter off at nursery I see the same little girl being dropped off too. She is always on her buggy which suggest they live nearby so could potentially walk but never ever do. At pick ups is the same, straight from nursery into buggy. Her face is always covered in chocolate (at 8 in the morning!) and she is always holding some sort of biscuit or chocolate belly so big her shirts don't come below her belly button. I am not talking about a bit chubby, or with a bit of a belly.

I cannot help to think poor child whose mum is happy to keep feeding her biscuits, chocolates, etc. when the child is clearly not in a healthy weight.

I can't help but silently judge her in my head so please can someone explain reasons for this. If you are a mum with an overweight child, why would you do this?

I may be simplifying things a but here but my understanding is that 1 kg of weight is equivalent to 7000 calories and this would be the same for an adult or a child. So 35 days at eating an excess of 200 calories would put on a kilo. It’s not hard to eat an extra 200 calories a day. An extra snack and a juice box. It’s not necessarily ‘bad’ food just extra food which adds up over time.

Would you be similarly judgemental about my son though? He frequently has chocolate cereal, or toast with biscuit spread, for breakfast, yet just happens to be very slim. Some kids are.
As an overweight person, I’ve certainly been judged as having an unhealthy diet when I don’t actually enjoy crisps, chocolate, cake very much. My thing is good home cooked food and meals out, just too much of them. Yet that doesn’t make you immune to the ‘eating five mars bars in a row’ sort of comments. As a fat person, you don’t even order a cake in a cafe or take a biscuit from the office tin because you know someone is going to look and say ‘oh that’s why then, look at her, no self control’. Which again can lead to disordered eating.

My dd has a friend who is lovely and a great mother, but is obese with an unhealthy relationship with food and feeds her children tons of junk food. As someone said I think food represents love

What world do you live in. There are many many single parents out there struggling.

I completely agree with you @ineedtoknowwhy. And I say that as an obese parent myself.

I have been extremely overweight since I was a young child. My parents are both also extremely overweight and definitely have a food=love attitude. They do not show affection in other ways. I never remember being cuddled or told I was loved as a child for example, but they’d buy me constant sweets etc. And they would remove these things as punishment which always led to me binging on everything I had for fear of losing it. We also didn’t eat as a family round a table or whatever, we ate watching tv or ate in our bedrooms.

Obviously I am an adult and responsible for my own wellness now. We do eat healthily, eat as a family and home cook all our meals. I have been a healthy weight in the past but am now overweight due mainly to an autoimmune disorder which makes it very hard for me to lose weight. And I very much admit to still falling into cycles of disordered eating when im feeling stressed etc.

I don’t think it’s fair to assume that obese parents mean the kids will be obese or that they eat necessarily unhealthily at home. You don’t know everyone’s circumstances.

I now have a DC of my own (4yo) and I am very conscious of how he is raised around food. I home cook our meals, we eat as a family at the table as much as possible, DS didn’t eat any sugary foods until he was old enough to ask for them. I don’t buy much in the way of prepackaged snacks. He loves to help cook too so we make a lot of meals together and he also picks some of our family meals each week.

I do also try and not restrict his foods (to an extent). I do believe it’s important not to label foods as “good” or “bad”. We talk about how food is like petrol for our bodies (he’s obsessed with cars 😅) and some foods are “supercharged” petrol and give us energy for longer and that’s what is better for our bodies to have most of the time. Other food still gives us energy but not as much. If we’re on a day out and he asks for a cake/ice cream etc then I’m absolutely fine with that - I never label it as being a “treat”.

I don’t drive so we walk everywhere. We live a 25 min walk from nursery, so walk there then I walk a further 20 mins to work. Then the same in reverse. It’s a 20 min walk to town or 25 mins to the supermarket. DS has been regularly walking these distances since was around 2/2.5.
He’s 75th centile for both height and weight, which he has been since birth. He’s 4.5 currently and wears age 4-5 clothing (occasionally a 5-6 in jumpers as he likes them baggy).

I know people will look at me as a plus sized parent when we’re out and about and judge the fact that my kid has sweets or an ice cream in his hand and thing that’s what he gets all the time but that’s far from the reality.
I do believe that half the time it must be lazy parenting or taking the easy way out and avoiding tantrums etc. But try not to judge other families that I see as I have no idea what their day to day looks like. There could be SEN in the family (both parents and children), allergies, lack of education around nutrition etc.

I'd say it's likely that the parents have disordered eating and a terrible relationship with food, themselves.

I disagree it's about cheapness- own brand cereal is cheaper than chocolate.

@Gandalfatemyhamster
As an overweight parent myself I completely agree. I wouldn’t have an ice cream etc when out with my son.

Would you be similarly judgemental about my son though? He frequently has chocolate cereal, or toast with biscuit spread, for breakfast, yet just happens to be very slim

Yes, I would. You're injecting him with sugar first thing in the morning. Just because he's slim now, doesn't mean he'll always be! Slim doesn't automatically equal healthy, either.sorry, bit you did ask and that's my opinion.

Would you be similarly judgemental about my son though? He frequently has chocolate cereal, or toast with biscuit spread, for breakfast, yet just happens to be very slim

A bit beside the point, but there is another thread running currently. The OP is concerned as her extremely sporty, very healthy eating DD has come in as overweight on the year 6 school BMI check. It just shows that ‘being slim’ in a vacuum is pretty meaningless when you see what some supposedly healthy children (as per what the school care about) eat.

my boy is 3 and is 23kg. (my girls were probably about 16kg at his age and very dainty things)

he isn’t over fed. i’ve fed him in exactly the same way that i fed my girls. he eats the same meals as us and has a nursery lunch. he loves fruit and veg and home cooked food and he’s not allowed chocolate or fizzy drinks but i will let him have a packet of crisps or chocolate roll cake now and again.(not daily)

i was overweight as a child, my mom and dad were both overweight so im thinking it’s genetics. he doesn’t look obese he’s tall and broad and chunky and very cute and squeezable.
im constantly worried about it and its not like you can put
a 3 year old on a diet when he already eats healthily

Because too many people don't understand nutrition or know how to feed themselves properly and then they go on to have children and there are no services or interventions to break the cycle. They likely feed their child that way because they were fed that way, it's pretty simple.

I'm a secondary food teacher, my subject isn't taken seriously. Much needs to change.

I think there's often a sort of "blindness" that comes with people's kids weight.
When my DS was a young baby he was REALLY underweight due to super bad advice on breastfeeding from NHS (I didn't have enough milk but was repeatedly gaslighted and told not to bottle feed). I was genuinely traumatised by his teeny weight. He was literally on the 0.3 percentile down from about the 50th at birth.
Anyway this stuck with me I think. And when I stared introducing bottles and actually food I genuinely didn't see that he was quite fat!
In fact the first time a family member mentioned it I was outraged. But a doctor confirmed. And I became a lot more sensible in how much I gave him. He's 10.now and lithe and skinny from fairly healthy eating and constant football. But in those early days I honestly didn't know. It was like something flipped in my brain and I was just terrified of him being so thin that I couldn't see anything else.

@Shwishto be fair to the NHS, the number of women who legitimately don't produce enough milk is absolutely tiny compared with the number who think or get told they can't.

@Perfect28 that may be true but it should have been bloody honest to a health professional what was happening. I don't want to hijack the thread but it was absolutely insane what they had me doing. I had twins as well so I don't think it's as unusual for someone to not have enough milk for 2. They were 4 months old when the one I'm talking about got admitted to hospital for bronchiolitis and a sensible doctor finally sat me down and told me to bottle feed.

It’s a tough one for sure! My sister was overweight as a child, I’m sure people would have looked at her and wondered what my mum was feeding her. My mum tried everything to be honest and I was always skinny so it wasn’t all her - we had healthy dinners, etc. but there were always “bad” foods in the house. My sister used to harrass my mum for food constantly as a child - she just couldn’t seem to get enough. It’s only something my sister has really got to grips with now, in her thirties. Shes struggled with her weight a lot over the years.

My DD used to ask for food constantly when she was 2-4 at the same time she would refuse most foods I offered her, as she really just wanted sweets. I think that she was often a bit bored rather than actually hungry. I would offer her a banana or apple but not give in to sweets so she was a healthy weight, but it would have been really easy to give in.

I have a theory that our way of living has changed faster than we can evolve to cope. How western society lives is very tech driven, vehicle dependent and convenience driven due to time pressures. I have connections to Orkney (still have a house there though live in a suburb of Glasgow). You don’t see fat kids. There will be a few on Orkney no doubt but fat people are unusual. There isn’t as much fast food. Low population means most of us have (them) have two sometimes three part time jobs. Not much point in driving to Kirkwall when walking is easier (tiny streets not built for parking) and very few live far away from the town to justify not walking. The teens are outdoors a lot and spend lots of time in the beaches and farming and the sea are still solid industry as is renewable energy. “Older” style of living. The world around us has moved faster than our MUST STORE FAT genetics can evolve for. Cities seem so disconnected. We don’t talk to our neighbours, we drive everywhere to avoid people and lock ourselves in our homes. Threads in here show much distress people suffer from having neighbours who have audacity to be visible/audible to them. The islands have stronger communities (kinda have to, fairly isolated by sea) and do seem to spend a lot more time out of the home involved with each other. Just a ramble that has crossed my mind 🤣

I agree. Chocolate sugary spread, chocolate cereal etc is not a good breakfast at all regardless of weight. Especially if it’s frequently as you say and not the occasional treat.

Since you’ve asked, yeah, I am a bit of a judgey pants about children and chocolate cereal or biscuit spread for breakfast, no matter how slim they are. But obviously the majority of the time I have no idea what other people’s children eat for breakfast.

But the fact is none of you would know. Why are we still making basic assumptions that people who are slim eat well and people who are fat do not? When that isn’t the case for many people.

Plus all the chocolate based cereals in the shops prove that there is a market and so MANY children are probably having this for breakfast. In Spain most children have a cake for breakfast (like a madeleine) and a cup of hot chocolate. Yet most children in Spain are slim.

i have noticed a few things.

Some people really don’t have the first clue about eating properly. I know people who literally live off sweets, takeaways and sugary drinks and they don’t even realise how bad their diet is.

Some people are in complete denial about their or their children’s weight.

Some parents are really struggling whether through poverty, poor mental health, not having the basic skills for parenting and they just do what’s easiest. If that’s shoving the child in a buggy with a chocolate bar at 8am then so be it.

Now you’re assuming that others all assume people who are slim eat well 😆. I know of plenty of slim adults and children who have a crap diet! Chocolate cereal etc still isn’t a great breakfast for a child to start their day with frequently even if slim.

I don’t think anyone would deny that there is a market for chocolate cereal, or that many children eat it. That doesn’t make it a reasonable breakfast. And it isn’t one I’d give my children.

The adults have poor knowledge/ relationships with food and they pass this on to their children.

as a scooper need to educate about nutrition and encourage healthy food choices .