'O'bese and 'O'verweight younglings
Let’s get real serious for a second here. Before we jump into the topic at hand, have a look at these unnerving statistics on the prevalence of childhood obesity in Brunei. Statistically speaking, 1 in 5 children in Brunei is considered obese and 3 out of 10 are considered overweight. These are alarming stats for a country striving to be outstanding in South East Asia.
You may think for yourself, “Hang on a minute, what’s the big deal here? Doesn’t that mean our children are being well taken care off? I wouldn’t want to put my kids through the same ordeal I had growing up!”
To which I would certainly say it’s a noble cause, but only beneficial when done in moderation. Letting our children over indulge in the sweet and savory can lead to innumerable, regrettable consequences if their condition exacerbated towards obesity.
For example, the obese child will experience high blood pressure and high cholesterol at an unnecessarily young age. This can predispose them to various cardiovascular diseases in adulthood. What’s worse, they may develop impaired glucose tolerance and even the dreaded type II diabetes mellitus. Their day to day activities will also be severely hampered from breathing problems such as asthma, sleep apnea, joint problems, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease plus other systemic diseases.
But wait, there’s more!
Apart from physical ailments, being obese can cause the child to develop a poor body image at a very young age. It’s more than likely that this will impact their mental health and self-esteem negatively – which consequently makes them vulnerable to bullying. In summary, an obese or overweight children seems to be subjected to a tougher start to life compared to their healthier counterparts.
Where to point the blame finger
Okay, I think I’ve convinced you that we should make serious attempts to prevent children from becoming overweight and obese. I believe most of us are somewhat aware of this problem – even if it’s just as a passing thought. However, most of our knee-jerk reaction would go first towards putting the blame on the parents of said child.
“You see that kid, [insert problem]; their parents didn’t raise them right!”
I have heard this phrase uttered more often than I’d like to admit. But thanks to that, it actually got me thinking – are the parents really to be blamed though?
In a sense, parents play a major role in a child’s outlook on food consumption. They form a large portion in affecting their child’s perception on healthy versus unhealthy eating habits as compared to let’s say, my own fitness journey as a full grown adult. I’m accountable for my own weight loss – much different to that of a 7 or 8 year old. Although I disagree that they are solely to be blamed, we should still be open-minded enough to sandbox this notion in order to identify the root cause of it.
The parental factors
Here, we should all take a good long look at the children’s home situation as that’s where the influence of parents would directly affect them. I believe it would come down to mainly two important aspects of the typical household family.
First, children tend to mimic what their parents eat. This is quite common in our local households where parents would often share the food they eat with their children, and also the children themselves tend to view their parents as their role models, picking up the same eating habits along the way. There was a study done in California, where it was found that teenagers whose parents drink soda daily are nearly 40% more likely to drink soda daily themselves. Now imagine that but with bags of chips, fried foods and sweets everyday – it’s more than likely the children will grow to be accustomed to thinking eating those junk food is the norm.
And second, the way parents supervise their children’s diet. Children who have more involved parents tend to have lower BMI compared to their peers whose parents do not monitor their eating behavior. In other words, it pays to be stricter on your children’s meal plan with the occasional indulgence sprinkled here and there. I find that being 80% strict on meals while being a bit rewarding 20% of the time works wonders as a balanced moderation for the children.
So, we have established the parental factor is the bulk in influencing their children’s health. Do you think the following statement can make a good conclusion to what we’ve found out so far?
“Ah, that’s an unhealthy kid – must be the parents not raising them right!”
I don’t think so too, that is simply ridiculous. On top of the parental factors, there also exists a myriad of external social factors which parents have to contend everyday. Some of which can be very subtle and ingrained that it can be difficult to break through. We’ll have to first examine these factors before we’ll be able to formulate a solution.
The social factors
Around the globe, cheaper food is often readily available and easily accessible. Even here in Brunei, how can you compete with the convenience and price of the $1 Nasi Katok when their stalls are scattered literally everywhere around your neighborhood. This brings me to my next point of social class.
Lower class families tend to regularly buy cheaper but less nutritious food (which are typically junk food) and are often less educated about the importance of good nutrition. Their priority is more to whether they can feed their children today, rather than worrying over the specifics of their ingredients or way of cooking.
Another battle that parents have to face is their soft spot for their own children. When they see their children getting upset because they denied them some fried chicken, parents tend to give in to their children’s tantrums – especially if it’s in a public space 
. When the child starts crying or rolling around on the floor, it makes for an extremely embarrassing scene for the parents in which they would inevitably want to diffuse quickly by relenting to the child’s wishes before making their quick escape. Societal pressure that expects parents to have proper children and not be a nuisance is still ingrained in our culture that we would forsake a lot to keep the happy family appearance up.
This next point I’d like to touch is based on the attractiveness of fast foods to young children. In a previous article, I’ve talked in depth about the bliss point and how it causes constant cravings for junk food to get the repeated dose of dopamine release. While that alone would work in getting both children and adults hooked on junk food, marketers have also been using other sneaky techniques to incentivize children to want to buy unhealthy meals. Those techniques are – collectible toys; and well-timed advertising.
For instance, we can take a look at how McDonald’s have leveraged trends across the years to increase the sales of their Happy Meals. I’m talking about the likes of Pokémon, Barbie, My Little Pony, Hot Wheels and most recently, making use of BTS (a famous K-pop band) merchandising. That alone was enough to drive a 12% increase in restaurant visits – far more demand the entire McDonald’s chain has seen this year alone. Couple that with buying advertisement slots during children’s shows, it makes up for a good marketing recipe to capture their intended audience.
So you see, these external social factors are really subtle but effective in influencing how children view food consumption. Either intentionally or not, our children will continue to be exposed to them as they live out in the real world. That is where parents would come in to make sure their children are properly guided as they grew.
Turning the tables
Parents still retain the most direct influence with the children by virtue of… well, being their parents/guardian. Which means, they will be the most capable in making sure that this issue would not balloon any bigger than it already is (no pun intended) starting with their own family.
1. Be a positive role model
As I’ve mentioned before, children tend to mimic what their parents eat. Hence by developing a proper, healthy eating habit, you are also subconsciously influencing your children to do the same. Learn to enjoy eating healthy and in time, your children too would follow suit. If you need help changing your typical diet, I’ll link you with one of my previous article right here!
2. Offer positive reinforcement
This is essentially building a positive neural association between eating healthy and the anticipated reward. For example, you can choose to reward them for eating healthy such as allowing them more play time with their toys, or allowing them to enjoy their favorite shows if they eat their fruits and vegetables. Overtime, this will inculcate the habit to eat healthier food. Just be sure that your reward is also not unintentionally causing any harmful side effects like too much screen time!
3. Starting young, staying strong
Remember this mantra for life. Teach your children the importance of a balanced diet while they’re still young. This will more than likely increase the “stickiness” of the habit into adulthood. Take my case for example, my family is very traditional and rarely eats fast food – at most I would get treated with a slice of pizza every Saturday, if I behave well enough. The rest of my meals consists of rice, vegetables and steamed fish, perfectly healthy food for a growing 10 year old boy. Till this day, I rarely ever find the craving to have any junk food. Although I do still enjoy that slice of pizza from time to time 🤣.
4. Find delicious low-calorie alternatives
Something fun for the parents and guardians to do with their children at home is to make healthier versions of their favorite fast food. It beats having the need to go the fast food restaurant and you get to enjoy some bonding time with your children while teaching them how to eat healthy. For example, did you know you can also use air fryers to make fried chicken instead of oil? Check it out – result is the same but with way less fat and grease! Google is your friend in this one, there are a plethora of recipes to choose from on the net. Then, it all just depends which food you’d want to try out first…
Well not that literally but I hope you get the point!
My closing thoughts
Frankly speaking, I’ve known a lot of parents – both old and from the younger generation – that are putting in an incredible effort in raising their children. As for my own thoughts, I would consider this big OO (Obesity and Overweight) problem to merely be a stumbling block from parents who care deeply for their children’s well-being.
Parenting is a long, arduous journey – there is no dedicated manual that lists out the right or wrong ways of parenting (as much as we want it there to be). Each individual couple have their own unique experiences and styles that it’s impossible to eliminate the slight mistakes that come up along the way. This issue of unhealthy eating habits being one of them that I’m passionately concerned about and I wish to have shed more light on the matter in this article.
What’s most important is to know that passing shallow judgement or giving rude remarks are NOT the way to educate anyone properly. Just like how I would share my own experience in my weight loss journey, I would also hope that the HTO blog will build the same supportive community around parenting to raise good, competent – and most importantly – healthy future leaders!
Editors note: Is this some sort of hint that we’re looking to publish more parenting related content? Maybe? Who knows? Time will tell. Stay tuned for more content. Cheers!