1) There has been a push to stop the use of physical force to discipline children post-WW2. The movement became very mainstream in the late 70s and governments around the world reflected this change in mores by modifying legislation to increasingly circumscribe the corporal punishment of children. Since 1979, 33 countries have fully abolished corporal punishment of children. And in countries like Canada where corporal punishment still isn't strictly illegal, it has been stringently limited.
2) The prevalence of childhood obesity greatly increased between 1980 and 2010. It's no secret. In the US, for example, 5.5% of children were recorded as obese in the 1976-1980 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, only a .5% point increase from the same survey done between 1971-74. But then, the number started climbing and had more than tripled to 16.9% when the survey was in 2007-08, despite roughly leveling off in the new millennium.
In short, the stigma & illegality of physically disciplining children has declined as the waistlines of those same children have expanded.
The Causation
Once society removed a parent's ability to physically discipline her child, alternative methods of asserting control had to fill the void. In addition, there was an increasing emphasis on positive reinforcement rather than negative reinforcement. High-sugar/high-fat foods like ice cream and candy are some of the most primal pleasures imaginable for a child so they can be used very effectively as positive reinforcement tools, much like biscuits for a dog.
I posit that parents have shifted their approach to control kids through their stomachs. In other words, what I'm suggesting is that once parents couldn't physically control their children they had to achieve their discipline goals by manipulating the trips to Dairy Queen.
The Solution
If my theory has merit then it puts parents in a very difficult position: On the hand, they can hit their kids and cause them to grow up mentally ill. Alternatively, they can refrain from hitting them up and they'll grow up physically ill (i.e. obese). This is a false dilemma, however, because we can bring back "running laps" as a commonplace punishment. It's the best of both worlds: the kids will stay in shape and they won't be psychologically damaged either.
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| Once society's prejudice against corpulence kicks in the fat kids we raised are despised. |
Sidenote: There is a picture of a girl in a playground at the top of the wikipedia page for childhood obesity. It's actually used on several pages related to the concept of "overweight". My worry is that one day, maybe five or ten years in the future when the girl in that photo with the muffintop is in college, she will chance upon it and think, "Oh hey, I had a shirt just like that when I was kid. Weird." Then she'll move on to reading the article and all the bad things about being overweight. The picture will be lurking in her subconscious when she reads a line like, "Obese and overweight people are more likely to die of cancer and also to never marry." At that point, her pernicious brain will make the connection. She'll check the date the photo was added to do the math to confirm it's her in the picture and realize how long she's been the poster girl for obesity.
Sidenote 2: I would love to have access to the raw data from the study described in this article that says corporal punishment does not increase the risk of childhood obesity because I want to know if the article is leaving out the stronger statement that corporal punishment is inversely related to childhood obesity because the article is focused on the link between neglect and obesity instead.
Ed. note: Thrawn wrote this post while shoveling nachos into his mouth.
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