Fat-proof Your Child: Parenting Advice and Child Obesity

• In Event: 504 - Regular Session. Social/Cultural Impacts on Parents and Parenting

Abstract

How are fat children represented in parenting advice? This paper examines how fat children and “childhood obesity” are depicted in popular media. I examine dominant cultural models of child fatness and the “obesity epidemic”, as presented in two flagship parenting magazines over the past three decades. Parenting magazines offer “expert” advice and everyday tips for managing children’s weight. I examine advice dispensed by two parenting magazines: one American (Parents) and one Canadian (Today’s Parent). I perform a content analysis of 104 articles (52 from each publication) that appeared in print between 1983 and 2014. This longitudinal approach allows for analysis of both historical and current characterizations of fat children as a social problem. This analysis finds that parenting magazines present the “obesity epidemic” as fact, as they characterize fat as serious health problem, offering ways to intervene and more recently, to prevent “child obesity”. Articles consistently and fearfully detail numerous negative health consequences that may befall fat children. In recent years all children are cast as passive and at risk for becoming fat. Individual parents, generally mothers, are presented as singularly responsible for children’s health, in contrast with earlier years, when children were seen as largely responsible for their own fatness. Fat is depicted as a medical problem to be solved through diligent, early parental intervention. Keeping children ignorant of the stigma associated with fatness is lauded. Parenting magazines endorse a gendered and classed, intensive model of parenting that assumes that parents should closely oversee and manage susceptible children.

Author

• Linda Quirke, Wilfrid Laurier University