It's Come To This: Baby Diets

Childhood obesity: not good. Putting perfectly healthy babies on diets so they don’t get fat? Not the solution. But tell that to a whole passel of weight-obsessed parents.

Now, on the face of it, this one mom’s diet for her baby, Maya, doesn’t sound unreasonable at all: ABC describes it as “well-balanced with fruit and vegetables, and no junk food.” But then we get to the mother’s rationale, and things get, well, dicier. “I don’t want her to have any of the problems that I had: the self-consciousness, health issues…I want her to have good self-esteem.” Oh, dear.

We’re not even going to touch the bottle versus breast conversation this subject always provokes — and at the end of the day, it’s the parental eating habits that will set the example — but at the end of the day, I think we can all agree that the above doesn’t jibe with one expert’s assertion that “You don’t want to project a lot of anxiety and stress about eating to your kids.” And any parent whose goal is thinness for its own sake is, to put it mildly, misguided. Perhaps the most chilling quote in the whole piece was this one:

“There’s some parents who are very pleased when their children are thin,” Hammond said. “A lot of fathers, even, they’re like, ‘Yes, my daughter’s thin,’ when the daughter’s like 5 or 6 months old.”

Parents Concerned About Babies’ Weight [ABC]
Parents Put ‘Fat’ Babies On Diets [Today]