So ladies (and gentlemen ) I came across an interesting discussion and I wanted to present it here.
Is it acceptable to blame your parents for your issue with food?
Do you blame your parents in any way for your struggle with food? If so, why?
This can be a very sensitive idea, particularly to mothers, so let me remind everyone to be respectful of other people's opinions. I'll offer my own opinion to the bucket after a couple others do, so not to poison the well.
Last edited by Wild Vulpix; 02-10-2010 at 07:49 PM.
If you are under 5 you can blame your parents but I think that as an adult everything is a choice and unless someone is holding you down putting food into your mouth that choice and control is all your own. My mom is 75 years old and has been overweight since having 9 children in 11 years. I have siblings that are normal weight and under weight and a few that are overweight and since I have been 15 I knew how to say yes and no to hunger and food. This is of course my opinion and I have supportive parents that love us big or small. I have never had to hide in my room eating while i was cursing them for my life. Unfortunately I need to gain that control for myself.
I think parents either trying to force healthy or being ignorant and feeding kids junk can both cause weight issues, so really I don't think it's fair to blame parents either way.
That being said I'm pretty sure my more serious weight issues began after I started driving/got a job... because my mom refused to let us have junk most of the time.... so I'd buy it myself. Went to college it just got worse and worse...
Parents didn't cause it. Did it contribute? Yes. The fault it my own though.
I think my issues with food came from a variety of factors - parents being one of them. Growing up when I was struggling it was easy to blame my parents as an easy way out. I do think children learn habits early from their parents so parents definitely have a huge role in teaching food/diet/nutrition to their kids at an early age. (As do teachers and other adults in the child's life)
Now after being honest with myself, the only person I can really "blame" is myself. My parents were having a difficult time knowing what to do with an overweight child so they tried to help in their own way. It's a learning process for both parents and kids and my parents didn't have all the answers never having been overweight themselves.
I actually was reading articles about Michelle Obama's new initiative to battle childhood obesity so I'm curious to know what other people think about this question. Some parents don't know much about nutrition themselves so it's difficult for them to help their own kids. I hope this program works!
I find the idea of blaming anyone, including for the most part myself but most especially other people, to be at best irrelevant, and at most destructive, to the process of losing weight.
The way I see it - if there was something my parents did, or could have done, and that something had an impact on my weight gain, knowing that can't possibly have any impact on whether I choose to change my behaviors NOW. Regardless of what they did, I am in charge of me now. Even regardless of what I did in the past, I am in charge of me now. So having someone to "blame" doesn't really change the reality of what needs to happen.
At worst, blaming someone else can lead to feelings of powerlessness (my mom screwed me up, so I can't possibly change my habits without years of therapy and etc. to resolve those issues) or resentment, and those can be very destructive to weight loss.
Now, I'm not saying that recognizing where your food issues come from isn't a good thing. It can help you identify triggers to overeat so that you can better control your behavior. But even in that, going the step further in identifying someone as "at fault" for the behavior seems counterproductive to me. You get the same benefit from realizing "I overeat when I am sick" as you do from realizing "I overeat when I am sick because my mom used to shower me with popsicles and soup to try to make me feel better"...in either case, you've learned that you need to be careful when you're sick. But in the latter, you're opening up a can of possible resentment, anger, and potential setbacks.
I was adopted, so who do I blame, bio-parents or adopted parents? I was obese by age 5. None of my siblings (one brother, also adopted and two sisters my parents bio-kids) had childhood weight problems (unless you call my also-adopted-not-biologically-related brother's unusual skinnyness until late adolescence a problem).
It seems silly to blame my biological parence if obesity happens to run in my bio-family for having the audacity to breed.
It seems just as silly to blame by adoptive family when my siblings who had the same upbringing didn't have the same weight problem.
I do think that some of my parents choices made my problems with weight and food worse, not better - but they did the best they could, with the knowledge and help they were given at the time. My pediatrician put me on a diet that no doctor today would put a 5 year old on, but who do I blame for being born in 1966 instead of 2005?
At 13, the same doctor prescribed amphetemine diet pills, which worked well. By the time I was a junior in high school, the pills weren't working anymore and I was struggling just to maintain 155 lbs (5 lbs away from my goal). Instead of praising the accomplishment, the doctor (a really sweet man, by the way. Very committed to his patients, and I believe doing what he thought best) changed my goal from 150 lbs to 140 lbs. I suspect he felt the more distant goal would motivate me further, instead of driving me off the diet entirely as it did (150 lbs seemed out of reach at the time, so 140 lbs seemed so be the final straw and I "broke" deciding that if 155 lbs wasn't good enough, I'd never be good enough so I might as well eat whatever I want because none of it mattered, anyway).
I was 16. I don't blame the doctor, my parents or me. Today, I would tell the doctor to take a flying leap and that if all I could manage was 155 lbs, then damn it, 155 lbs was good enough.
As for healthy behavior role models, my parents were average. Modeling many healthy habits, and many not-so-healthy ones. They tried to help me manage my weight, but they could only rely on the information they were given, and quite a lot of it was crap (but it was "cutting-edge" at the time).
Do I wish my parents, doctors, and I myself had made some different choices than the ones we did?
Very much so, but I don't think that it's necessary to blame anyone, not even myself. We all did the best we could, and our best wasn't good enough.
Even now, I don't have to blame myself to make changes in my life. In fact, I find myself more successful when I don't blame myself or anyone else.
I think my grandmother has an unhealthy attitude toward food and weight--she views it as a character issue and attaches all sorts of other things to it--she loves her children when they are overweight, but she has less respect and esteem for them. This attitude has trickled down to some degree or another to all her (12) children, and they've all passed it on to their kids.
It's good that I realize this, not to blame her, but to see how their is an unhealthy cycle going on--in my mind, eating or not eating becomes about worth and is associated with guilt and shame. I had to recognize that this is not a healthy relationship with food and that what I had accepted as the norm for most of my life is not the only way to be. If I have children of my own, I need to know this so that I can pass different patterns down to them. But this isn't blame--I'm not angry or anything.
No, I don't blame my parents, I blame the money hungry food industry that brain washed me with haunting advertisements by the time I knew what TV was, and then drugged me with chemicals that most scientists can't even pronounce, that are so addictive that they put meth to shame. E.V.I.L.
My mom put a healthy dinner on the table every night (a meat, a starch a veggie) and didn't buy soda or sugary sodas. We drank milk, iced tea or water and we didn't really snack much (I remember lots of bags of granny smith apples). My folks weren't loaded, so we went out to dinner rarely and fast food was very rare.
Now, my mom went back to work when I was 11 and I had to babysit my kid brother. We weren't allowed to go outside after school (or all summer) while my folks weren't home. We just sat home, watched TV. I ate to relieve boredom.
Once I traced back my afternoon munchy munchies to days after school spent watching Barney's ARmy and eating white bread sprinkled with sugar, I realized I found the root of my issue. Eliminating afternoon boredom munchies was key for me.
I still don't blame my parents though, they were pretty awesome parents.
I really don't know what my parents could have done differently to keep me from being overweight. I mean, if they had suddenly removed all treats from the house and gotten super strict on my diet, I probably would have ended up with much worse food issues. The fact is, I was just an eater as a child, my sister was not. I got fat, she stayed thin. My weight issues didn't come on until I started going to school (trading lunch with others, spending my allowance in the ice cream line) and hanging out at friends' houses after school (some of which had every snack imaginable). My parents enrolled me in sports (let me pick which one) and cooked healthy meals at home. I'm sure they weren't 100% perfect, maybe they could have taken more time to teach me about nutrition. But it can be a difficult thing to discuss with your child without giving them a complex, and I'm not sure it would have worked. I was a kid, I didn't think about consequences. I knew cookies made me fat, but I liked cookies damnit. So, no, I don't blame my parents.
No, I don't blame my parents, I blame the money hungry food industry that brain washed me with haunting advertisements by the time I knew what TV was, and then drugged me with chemicals that most scientists can't even pronounce, that are so addictive that they put meth to shame. E.V.I.L.
I agree
I think the issue here for many of us, parents and children, is education and knowledge.
I am almost 56 years old. I grew up with outstanding loving parents.
My parents were from the mid-west, we grew up with "healthy" breakfasts of eggs, bacon and fried potatoes....white bread. On school days we did not get out of the house with "at least " some Carnation Instant Breakfast.
Dinners were fried chicken, corn and potatoes with plenty of butter or OLEO! Tons of hamburger and hot dogs.
To my mom "healthy" dinners meant our regular dinner with fruit and salads...we had that.
We never had many snacks or sodas in the house, this was probably more because we couldn't afford it.
moving forward....I became a dad...then a single dad....
I never had a weight problem until I was past 40....
I never thought much about healthy...why should I...I was a smoker
As a dad and a GREAT DAD a skinny dad....I never thought much about how to feed my kids...other than "healthy"...
making sure they had plenty of fruits and veggies and juice to go with those fast food dinners I shoved down their throats when they were kids...
I had to...I was a single dad...leaving for work at 4:30am...picking them up at school and running them year-round to their sports/dance/scouts and youth group activities....I had to....
fast forward 20 years....
Would I do it the same...of course not...I have learned a lot about food and nutrition...would my mom...not a chance...
both of us did what we thought was right...
would my kids ever blame me for fast food...never...they know I did what I thought was best for them....
BLAME does no one any good....
EDUCATION....KNOWLEDGE....
Be blamed for being educated and knowledgeable about nutrition by your kids if you are a parent
I sort of blame my parents. They were both really lame depressed drunks that had kids late in life just for their own selfish reasons to fulfill some biological need. They (excuse my language) half *** raised me and my brother, and rarely cooked. If they did, it wasn't very healthy. There wasn't a lot of food in the house, but when there was it was usually junk, or poorly cooked things like steak and spaghetti (so we hated those things, neither rents could cook). We did have fast food a LOT... and my dad used to bring us home a candy bar with his beer every day. I started to get fat when I was like 7, my brother never (Slavic genes grrr). I mean, you learn what's normal from your parents, and I thought everyone drank a lot of wine and ate McDonalds twice a week and piled their plate really high with Chinese Food, and ate entire bags of Butterfingers in one sitting.
As I began to RAPIDLY gain weight in high school, I tried desperately to eat healthy but I had absolutely no idea how. Literally. When I first joined Weight Watchers at 17, I was shocked to see how much I was eating and how bad it was. I'd had no idea.
So yeah. I mean, I guess it's not COMPLETELY their fault, but they sure did a bad job at teaching us eating habits. My mom regrets it now, and now that I'm losing weight on my own, she's pretty proud of me and supports me a lot for taking care of this while I'm still young. So I'm thankful for that.
I don't blame my parents but I'm aware that they were both brought-up during the post war period with food rationing and that part of 'doing their best' was making sure that my siblings and I were stuffed with as much food as we could manage. I'm also aware that I'm the only one in my family with a weight/food problem, so maybe the overfeeding doesn't have that much of an impact on most kids.
I blame myself, not my parents, not the food industry or commercials. Just me.
Could my mom have taught us about nutrition better? Sure. Could she have not given in every time we wanted McDonald's? Sure. Could she have actually prepared meals at home, rather than refusing to because she'd cooked all day at the school cafeteria for everyone else's kids? Sure - but we ate a lot of take-out anyway.
But she didn't MAKE us sneak Little Debbies. She encouraged us to go outside and play, and to get involved in sports. But when we got older, she couldn't MAKE us continue to participate when we didn't want to. She was working a minimum of two jobs to pay bills and wasn't around a lot to oversee our daily activities. We were lucky to have electricity and running water (and did without both more than once), so a normal meal was a frozen pizza or hot dogs and chips or mac and cheese, since they were usually on sale for really, really cheap.
No, the blame is on me. When I became an adult, or at least a mobile teenager, I knew I was fat. I just didn't CARE. I knew I should care, but I didn't. I still skipped breakfast, ate fast food for lunch and whole pizzas for dinner. I didn't do anything other than sit around.
And I can't blame the food industry either. Maybe when I was a kid the cereal commercials and toys got to me....but as an adult - not quite. I had the capability of saying no at any given point in time and changing my life. It took until I was 27 to muster up enough drive and willpower to do it.
I think parents can be to blame for making it harder to make the right food choices and portion sizes. However clearly we are all responsible for our own decisions regardless of our home environment.
This really stuck out to me the other day with my toddler. My wife stays at home and she has always fed my daughter super healthy. Very balanced meals, no junk food whatsoever. The first time my daughter had "dessert" other than fruit was a cupcake at her 1 year birthday. I cannot really imagine doing more from a diet perspective to program her towards eating simple meats veggies and fruits (which she does great with).
Anyway fast forward, now she is almost 2. About 3 weeks ago for whatever reason we gave her a few fruit loops for her afternoon snack. Literally from that one time on whenever it is now time to eat she goes to the cupboard and begs for "loot loops". We aren't the type of parents to oblige but it was amazing how just one taste of something like that created a mini-obsession. And I can understand how easy it can be for parents to give in.
Blame the Parent Society
) I came across an interesting discussion and I wanted to present it here. 
a skinny dad....I never thought much about how to feed my kids...other than "healthy"...
