I was just playing and trying to provoke with my recent post asking whether obesity was a product of “mummy culture”. I thought it was probably the truth, but not the whole truth. And I thought it was more to do with Mum being seduced into supersizing our lunch boxes and dinner plates and driving us to school, in both cases to avoid risks, rather than anything else.
University of Sydney researchers have turned up a whole new area where mums influence obesity – modelling. The sort of modelling where children copy their mothers. According to yesterday’s Australian (as reported in U Syd’s In the Media email):
Australian
p6 Mums take fat flak (Prof Louise Baur, Paediatrics and Child Health, The Children’s Hospital, Westmead)
The Nepean Cohort study has shown how mothers eat and how much television they watch determines whether or not their children will become fat adolescents. Project leader Louise Baur a paediatrician with the Children’s Hospital at Westmead said modelling healthy behaviours influences the choices children make.
I wonder why they don’t model Dads as well?
And high achieving Mums are more likely to have anorexic daughthers – at least that was a finding a few years ago. Everyone has always blamed mothers for most everything.
Comment by Jennifer Marohasy — July 21, 2005 @ 9:38 pm
it’s not about blaming mothers. (most) children do imitate their parents (autistic children being an exception). where do you think they learn behaviours and habits? its from the people around them.
it amuses me, in an awful way, that people are surprised to learn that children imitate their parents. particularly when it is often the parents who are the most shocked.
doesn’t anyone pay attention to anything anymore – without having to be paid to do so? are people really so self-absorbed that the outside world is irrelevant?
as for the question about fathers: children do mirror them as well. however many fathers and mothers they might have.
if more people thought just a little more about the way others might be perceiving they way they act, we just might get a little more sanity around us.
if you think i’m wrong, go watch a day’s worth of family court action. watch the children (the one’s under 18, not the so-called ‘adults’).
Comment by maelorin — July 22, 2005 @ 5:06 pm