Kids Weight: It’s not About Responsibility but Responsiveness in Parenting

Be Responsive to Your Kids’ Needs & not to their Whims & Fancies

Forcing your Kid to Finish Off the Food? It’s Not Going to Help

How about making our newborns and small infants obese as well? We have developed into a society that takes pride (sarcastically indeed) in nurturing obese/overweight citizens worldwide and the next step is to pass over this body weight identity to our younger generation as well. Even now, more than 25% of children aged between 2 and 5 years are said to be overweight/obese. This isn’t a shocking news given the fact that we feed what we eat. When its French fries, potato wafers and doughnuts that pass into our body as a snack we are bound to give the same to our kids. Even if we have a good intention of providing them with healthy fruits, vegetables and dairy how do you think they are going to respond to this act of yours? With a BIG ‘no’ indeed!

Parenting Protocols
Overweight/obese children are at an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, High BP and other serious health problems. A chubby kid is lovable and adorable but that’s not all that we want from a kid. He/she must be active and healthy firstly. A dimple might be cute but a second chin is not! Just because your infant cannot speak for his/her own it doesn’t mean that you go on feeding him/her until the kid is overfull! C’mon parents, we have crossed those stages and we do realize how troubled we were by such acts. Don’t trouble your little one into eating all that you feed and blame your child later for overeating during adolescence. This is bound to happen because you have groomed them without helping them realize fullness and hunger signs during childhood!

Be a responsible parent. Even a study says so! This study was set up with the sole task of understanding whether teaching ‘responsive parenting’ had the strength to prevent rapid weight gain during infancy and help the children grow in a healthier surrounding. Parents who are taught about responsive parenting respond to their kids in ways that suit their age and fulfill their needs. For example, parents are taught to recognize signs of fullness in children while they are feeding and stop feeding immediately. This is only a small example available from the ocean of things that are taught in this process.

What the Study Says
We have had previous studies that showed that responsive parenting was helpful in preventing weight gain in a baby’s first six months of life, reduced a child’s body mass index (BMI) and also improved the infant’s sleeping patterns. The latest study included 272 mother-infant pairs of which 232 could complete the three-year trial. The average age of mothers were around 28 years and they were randomly split into either of the two groups-responsive parenting and the control group. Mothers in the responsive parenting group were taught how to respond to their infant’s sleep, play, feeding routines and emotional tantrums while those mothers in the control group were taught about home safety. Every member in either of the group was met by a nurse in their respective homes on four different occasions during infancy and once during the child’s first, second and third year. Results showed that:

• Children in the responsive parenting group had a significantly lower BMI than those in the control group.
• Only 13 children (11.2%) were overweight and 3 (2.6%) obese in the responsive parenting group while 23 (19.8%) children were overweight and 9 (7.8%) obese in the control group.
  
  

So, parents do you agree now that your style of parenting does play a prime role in impacting a child’s eating habits? Never get stuck by the ‘clean plate’ club. There are several research studies showing the pathetic life of those children burdened by the clean eating technique adopted by parents. If this is the first time that you have come across the word ‘clean plate’ then its high time that you become aware of it with the help of www.firsteatright.com. Maybe you are a member of the clean plate club but its only that you don’t know the technical term for it! Children of this club are never able to recognize their fullness cues, continue to eat whatever is there on their plate (afraid that they would disappoint their parents otherwise) and land up being overweight/obese. Sticking to certain rules and regulations are good signs of parenting but you also need to realize where to draw the line and not cross boundaries. 

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