This morning I decided to browse the Globe & Mail website and I read this article, The More Mom Works, the Heavier the Child: Study. Really? Come on! More mother blame.
The article is quite unbalanced and it seems like the intention is to get a debate raging in the comments….I guess it’s more of a blog post than an article. The article loosely covers a study that shows that the number of years a mother worked resulted in a small increase in the BMI of her children. The study was controlled for screen time and physical activity but the reasons for the BMI increase were not clear. The Globe post (I’m going to call it a post) was based on a short article in Science Daily. Here is the original journal article. The conclusion is that we need to help families with work/home balance and provide more education with community and school based programs promoting healthy eating and meal preparation. OK, but, ummmm, we’ve been doing that for a long time. Talk to some one at your local health unit and you’ll hear frustration about how this isn’t working. Most schools have healthy eating promotion programs. Every day I see lunches packed with junk; some without a single healthy item. I’m not saying that these programs aren’t necessary, but they are not enough. Maybe schools should serve up healthy lunches and snacks for free.
Instead of debate, we should be working together on some solutions. Annie at PhD in Parenting just wrote a post about supporting families instead of placing blame. I don’t understand why we can’t look to countries like Finland which seem to have a great system. This is what Finland offers:
- Two year parental leave.
- Universal daycare
- Play based pre-school
- Formal education starting the year a child turns 7 (just the right age according to child development
- There is no standardized testing
- Secondary school programs that suit the person, either academic or
- Free Post Secondary School
Also, we need to deal with underlying issues of poverty, the food industry’s role, the government’s role, and our collective priorities. These are all issues that we have been talking about for years and very little is ever done. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but we don’t act like a village. Somewhere along the line in our history we adopted an individualist ideology; we tend to focus on ourselves, and our own, at the expense of the collective. We’ve also become very much focussed on consuming.
These are the things that drove me crazy in university and led to my crisis of faith (in humanity, I’m an atheist). I wish I had all the answers. I know we could do better, but how? I used to think that electing a “leftish” government might be the answer but now I’m not so sure. One thing I’ve learned is that we create these “systems” and they seem to take over. Like Hal did in 2001: Space Odyssey. We seem to become cogs in the machine of our own systems. Even when there is a revolution, the old system is just replaced with a new one. The new one may be a lot better than the old (or not) but it’s still a system and then it takes over. We need to stop taking the blue pill and take the red pill so we can see what’s really going on.
Those are my meandering Deep Thoughts for this morning. I think I’ll go out snow shoeing with the girls to clear my mind.
Sheila says
Amen to supporting families instead of placing blame. And I applaud your point about examining the underlying issues of poverty, the food industry, government’s role, and consumerism. It’s going to take change across the whole of society to address the problems of nutrition, health, and making healthy lifestyle choices. And even when we know what we should be doing, it’s so easy to be tempted by something that is fast and easy and tastes good. (ahem, Oreo cookies, hmmm.)
Unfortunately, I’m afraid the nutrition/fitness education campaign is going to be like the anti-smoking campaign, which has taken at least 30 years (50?) to educate, change public attitudes, and reduce the incidence of smoking and the consequent health effects. Even yet, smoking seems to be much more prevalent in some age groups, some socioeconomic groups and some cultures and regions. That battle is not won yet.
Annette Cloutier says
Thanks for that insight Erin…while I’m not an atheist, I do believe we share the value of quality time spent with our children…this being one of the keys to healthy living, healthy relationships, etc. Many households (I am assuming that the study includes only households with two incomes from two parents and of course…the burden of the diet and groceries on Mom…how about a piggy back study on this study on Dad / partner contributions to grocery choices and cooking and lunches and let the true colours shine and flip the finger around in another direction) …anyways, I digress… our culture has forgotten about the value of time together at meals…at least supper…for at least 15 minutes. I would like to see a study on the co-relation between supper time together (without t.v.) and BMI. Have a great day!