A while back, the news was peppered with articles on the rising number of child obesity cases and while most were spot on, they missed out on one important thing – obesity in children starts even from birth. I managed to send over my thoughts despite a busy schedule at work and at home (neos overshoes, anyone?) but it never got published; I guess it would have opened up a can of worms among most parents as well as companies like Milo, Nestle and Vitagen, so I’ll share it here instead:

After reading the opinions shared by the writer here, I would like to share a few insights of my own.

While the Government and its respective ministries have discussed much on adult obesity and preventation, little has been mentioned about the role of today’s parents and childhood obesity which is fast becoming a problem in this region.

Childhood obesity starts from birth, when parents overfeed children with milk on the belief that whenever a baby cries, it means that she or he is hungry. Confinement ladies, babysitters and the older generation who help care for children insist that crying equals hunger and that a chubby baby is a healthy baby. Never mind that a baby can be overweight despite popular belief that there is no such thing and that the only way a baby can communicate is by crying. We teach our babies to comfort feed, and encourage them to have a larger than normal appetite. We continue this into toddlerhood and worse, we allow them to develop unhealthy eating habits and practices such as giving them cookies and biscuits as a reward for eating vegetables. This merely teaches them that cookies and biscuits are better for them than vegetables – an old practice which is hardly beneficial in the long run for children. We stuff our children like Christmas turkeys; I have seen parents and grandparents give adult servings of milk (250ml) and porridge (one standard adult size bowl) to a baby below 10 months old around the clock. This is clearly too much for the child. The excuse is that the child demands food but do people actually step back and think about it? A child does not develop a huge appetite overnight; their preference for quantity of food is something that is honed over time and through habit.

Not only do we encourage our toddlers to eat more than the recommended amount, we don’t provide them with a balanced and varied diet. We start them on more meat and grains than we do with vegetables and fruits on the grounds that fruits and vegetables are “cooling” or “sweet”. Yet, we find the same parents giving their children drinks like Milo, Yakult and juice which have high contents of added sugar. Alternatives to such items would be natural yogurt with fruit puree, cocoa with milk and fresh fruit. We don’t encourage toddlers to develop feeding milestones like learning to chew chunky food or self-feed. Instead we drown them in porridge and little else until they are two to three years old. Then we resort to pumping them with milk – more milk than recommended by paediatric nutritionists and dietitions – or worse, supplements on the grounds that their diet is not balanced and that their child is picky or fussy. However, parents fail time and time to understand that good eating habits start from the moment a child is introduced to solids. The older a child is, the harder the habit is to break so it’s best to start introducing a variety of foods early to encourage a child to have an adventurous palate.

On top of that, we don’t encourage children to be active. We start them on the television before they can even walk on the pretext that it helps their mental development although this has yet to be proven. When they start walking, we encourage them to stay indoors because it’s not safe outdoors. When they eventually head out, they are bundled into shopping carts and strollers. How many parents and grandparents accompany and encourage their grandchildren to walk, or even play? While the town council should be responsible for the maintenance of playgrounds, parents and grandparents should find the initiative to be creative when it comes to toddler activities. One can always find things to do in the home. The simple act of climbing up and down stairs with supervision not only provides a toddler with some exercise but is also a useful tool to teach children to develop motor skills as well as learn safety at home. Instead we restrain them on the pretext that we want to protect them but we fail to understand that too much restriction is bad for them. As they grow older, we encourage them to be lazy. We bundle them into shopping carts and push them around when they should be walking. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen children older than 4 years old sitting in shopping carts or strollers when they could be walking around and even helping their parents.

We hardly lead by example – we drive even though we can walk, complaining that a ten minute walk is too far; we eat unhealthily as well, preferring greasy, fattening, overly salted and sweetened foods that we find outside instead of cooking at home and so forth. The common excuse to eating out is “I don’t know how to cook”, which should never be an excuse in what we call the Information Age today. Parents and grandparents need to understand that in order to prevent obesity, they must change their mindset towards what is healthy and what isn’t. A change of mindset doesn’t mean that one is unfit to be a parent – that was never in question to begin with – but merely an improvement on current parenting skills. With any luck, a parent’s lifestyle will change as well and for the better.