Friendship in Childhood
A loving and supportive family is great, but parents and siblings can't be your child's entire social sphere. Forming healthy relationships with peers with whom your child can play, commiserate, talk, and just have fun is important to her emotional well-being and development. Yet kids with weight problems often face discrimination and bias at the hands of their peers. This is especially true as children move into the adolescent years where appearance issues and fitting in become of paramount importance.
It's great if your child already has a variety of positive and mutually rewarding friendships in her life. Do what you can to encourage these relationships. What about those that you don't approve of? Regardless of your feelings, give your child the autonomy to choose her own friends, and make those friends welcome in your home. Forbidding the relationship will be less effective than expressing your concerns to your child in a calm and nonjudgmental way.
If a “friend” starts to avoid your child after she's become the target of weight-related teasing, or says hurtful words, try to focus your child on more positive relationships in her life. With older children, you may be able to point out that this person probably wasn't a true friend to begin with. Talk to your child about what makes a good friendship. Tell her that true friends care about the person inside, and they demonstrate that caring through both their words and actions.
Popularity Contests
The teen years can be tough for even the best-adjusted kid. School is more demanding. Puberty brings a hormonal onslaught of physical and psychological changes, and what your peers think of you becomes close to the center of your existence.
The adolescent “fat stigma” found in the NLSAH also extended to those normal-weight teens who did count overweight peers as friends. These teens were considered less popular and had fewer friends than those adolescents who only listed normal-weight peers as friends.
For the better part of a century, American culture has hammered home the message that thin is desirable and attractive and fat is ugly. Being overweight is considered a weakness, a sign of a lack of self-control and discipline, or just plain gluttony. Yes, excess fat is unhealthy. So is cancer, but most adolescents would never think to ostracize a child with leukemia, while many don't give a second thought about calling an overweight child “fat” or excluding her from a party or get-together.
Just how bad is the problem? The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (NLSAH), a survey of over 90,000 kids aged thirteen to eighteen, found that adolescents who were overweight were more likely to be socially isolated than their normal-weight peers. When asked who their friends were, teens of average weight were less likely to mention overweight teens, even when those teens mentioned them. Overweight teens listed about the same number of friends as their average-weight peers, however, indicating that overweight teens were either overestimating their friendships or their normal-weight peers weren't acknowledging the friendships.
There's some good news to be found in all of this. The study also found that overweight kids were better adjusted socially, with more friends, when they were less socially reclusive and more involved in extracurricular or community activities than when they avoided contact with others. The message? Empower your child to believe in her abilities and to get involved with activities she likes for her own enjoyment, not to prove a point to anyone. Just by being herself, she can explode those myths about “fat kids” and show those peers who may hold preconceived notions about her just how wrong they are.
Developing a Peer Support Group
There are many options besides school for finding true and supportive friends. Church youth groups and community-based organizations are good starting places for your child to form positive new friendships. When those groups also promote volunteer work and community activism that she can take part in, they have the added benefit of giving your child a boost to her self-esteem.
A child who is having problems connecting socially with peers, or who just wants to find a friendly ear, may benefit from a support program for overweight kids or teens. Hospital- or clinic-based fitness and weight-control programs frequently offer some form of group therapy or support sessions as part of the program. A support group that focuses specifically on your child's age group may be useful in helping him develop new friendships with understanding peers.
