The astronomic rise in the number of children suffering from eating disorders is very disturbing. According to recent studies, approximately 40% of today's children aged nine have already tried dieting to various extents. If you find this disquieting enough, what would you feel if I told you that researchers also found out that there is a rising trend of children ranging from four to five years old expressing their need to diet? Why are our children feeling this way? Why do they express the need to diet? What are we doing wrong?
Research has pointed out several factors, which may have contributed to this ever-increasing trend of eating disorders in children. Among those worthy of mention are emotional or psychological trauma, family and the media.
Events that result in emotional or psychological trauma predispose a child to develop eating disorders. It was noted that children who were brought up in dysfunctional families were more prone to acquire the disease than those children raised in loving environments were. This is also true in cases where children are raised in environments where feelings are not allowed to be expressed. In both settings, children's emotions are bottled up prompting them to turn to food for comfort or to help them deal with what they are feeling. They might latch on to food and eating to release their pent up anger, frustration, sadness, hurt, fear, feeling of abandonment and pain.
Children who were victims of emotional or physical abuse are also at high risk of developing the disease. They might try to relieve their feelings and try to gain control of an otherwise unmanageable situation by resorting to food and controlling their eating habits. They might try to avoid food in an effort to control their weight so that they might disappear and not go through the abuse anymore.
Family also plays a crucial role in the development of eating disorders in children. Children often see their parents as their idols, their heroes, their role models. So what would the children think if their parents are preoccupied with their own bodies and their weights? When the parents express apparent dislike towards their bodies, the children will perceive that weight and appearance are very important.
In some cases, the parents might mistakenly take baby fat as actual fat and force a child to diet. This can be a form of robbing a child of his or her childhood and can be considered an extremely cruel act.
In other families, a double standard is imposed allowing boys to eat to their hearts' content while limiting the food intake of girls. This is so that boys can have well-built and muscular bodies (a must for the macho society) while the girls maintain a slender figure (again a dictate of the society). Most mothers even take a step further and lecture their daughters how important it is to have a thin figure for them to find happiness and a man that will love them when they grow up.
The media also helps spread the notion that being thin is a central factor for success and happiness. Along with promoting the newest in kids' fashion comes the media's endorsement of the ideal figure. Media makes the kids want to wear the newest designer clothes, be adorned with the latest accessories and look perfect wearing them. As a result, the children strive to achieve the society's idea of a perfect figure and this sets the stage for the development of the disease.
Eating disorders can be very disastrous, even more so for the young bodies of our children. Let us not push them towards the hands of these harmful evil. Let us teach our children to accept and love themselves by loving them unconditionally, whatever size or shape they might be.
