Childhood Obesity: An Ignored Parental Responsibility

Throughout these past decades, the problem of childhood obesity has gone in parents ears and out of the other. Parents are ignoring the obvious problem in front of them, and their kids are suffering for it. These children will grow up and live difficult lives with many obstacles because of their parents' choices. Obese children face both long-term and short-term physical and emotional effects. The cause of this is the parents refusal to change their lifestyle. Childhood obesity continues to affect the lives of children on an emotion and physical level because parents are not feeding their kids properly. Many people mistake being overweight and being obese. Being overweight is as the name suggests, being over the normal weight for a

One short term emotional effect is having a low self-esteem. He or she feels ashamed of their body, which gives them a lack of confidence. This sometimes leads to receiving poor grades in school. They also get bullied and made fun of because they are obese. Which makes it hard for them to have friends and make new friends, Not being able to make friends and being made fun of every day, leads to the second short term effect which is depression. These children feel sad of they don't belong anywhere and feel like an outcast. They become lonely and then become sad and depressed(“Childhood obesity”). Now that they are sad and depressed they do the third short term effect, social isolation. The children isolate themselves from the rest of the world, because they don't feel like they fit. This makes them more lonely and it makes it harder for parents or doctors to give them help. Some children or older ones, then resort to doing drugs to numb the pain. It's easier to live in an illusion than facing reality. Lastly another short term effect is emotional eating. Some obese children find comfort in eating food(Reinberg). This is just adding even more calories to their plates at the same time their parents are telling them to eat less. One long term effect is chronic depression. Being made fun of day after day, month after month, year after year takes a toll on these children, and really puts a scar on them for the rest of their lives. Also children who are obese tend to become obese adults when they grow up. Another long term effect is that their life expectancy is reduced to more than nine years. All together studies have shown that obese children rate their quality of life to be lower than a child who has cancer. These poor children have to go through so much emotional stress, but they also have physical effects as