It rails against everything parents know to say less is more in raising children.
The time and energy spent managing the success and future of a child leaves little room for the child's personal growth and exploration. Forget any concept of small successes and failures: these kids are praised moment to moment as if they invent electricity every other day.
No measure of success truly matters because it is the norm. In fact, many communities just create endless rounds of success for kids these days--trophies for everyone--and not a whit of criticism or room for improvement.
Perfectionism has become the expected way of life. Difficulty translates into difference. No one, parents included, can tolerate failure. Ever.
For readers of this blog and, for that matter, any literature about eating disorders, this mindset will be very familiar. It describes to a tee one central personality trait for people with eating disorders. Motivation gone awry turns into overwhelmingly impossible standards. Internal drive without reason or purpose makes people need a way to opt out of completely unrealistic goals. Life is too hard when the expectations are so unreasonable.
Instead kids find perfection another way, namely through manipulating food and weight.
Parents also struggle to accept imperfections in their children. Just because each kid gets a trophy doesn't mean they're all equally good at the sport. Adults, even those taken by fantasies of wildly successful prodigy, see the writing on the wall sooner or later. Accepting that reality and realizing their child is just another imperfect person are not easy pills to swallow.
When faced with this reality, parents can turn to food and weight just as much as children. The illusion of creating a perfect child because of correct eating and weight maintenance becomes very alluring. Part of that can be positive reinforcement by adults who approve of a child's body type, but an overweight child can cause concern in adults and lead parents to use weight loss as a goal with their child, as a way to perfect their offspring.
Establishing food restriction and weight loss as central to a child's identity severely limits their personal growth and development as well. At a time when a child is learning about their place in the world, focusing on something so limiting and narrow as weight can quickly derail their maturing selves.
In this realm, the goal of parents is to reinforce the personal qualities of that child, psychological, emotional and physical, while protecting the child from the collective forces trying to focus family energy on food and weight. A consistent message from parents can balance those outside pressures and ensure the child knows the alternatives that exist in understanding oneself.
It can be very difficult for parents to brush off outside comments about their child's physical appearance, especially when critical. Aggressively defending one's child against those adults who make comments only gives their thoughts more credence. The key is to discredit their thoughts while always presenting another way to see the world.
Consistency, clarity and balance can, over time, allow the child to learn different ways to balance food and weight in a different world philosophy. The idea is not to eliminate those messages that reflect body and weight obsession since parents don't have that kind of power. It's rather to provide an alternative that so that the child knows there are more important things to life.
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