Stop weight-shaming children

 As much as I admire Michelle Obama, I was never in favor of her Let’s Move campaign to fight obesity in children. And it’s not because the program didn’t do much good (childhood obesity rate jumped from 27.5 percent in 1999 to 33.2 percent in 2014). My objection to the program has to do with shaming children.

The experience of shaming was recounted by an op-ed writer in The New York Times, who, as a child, learned from her doctor that her “body was wrong.” “I’d failed a test I didn’t even know I’d taken, and the sense of failure and self-loathing it inspired planted the seeds of a depression I would live with for many years.” Her life, she says, was “filled with self-flagellation, forced performances to display my commitment to changing an unacceptable body.” Despite her best efforts, thinness never came.

“Even at such a young age I had been declared an enemy combatant in the nation’s war on childhood obesity, and I felt that fact deeply. Bodies like mine represented an epidemic, and we were its virus, personified.” She sees the war on childhood obesity as pursuing one question: how do we make fat kids thin? “In other words, how do we get rid of fat kids?…Weight stigma kick-starts what for many will become lifelong cycles of shame. And it sends a clear, heartbreaking message to fat children: The world would be a better place without you in it.”

Well, that’s pretty sad. As the headline of this piece says, “Leave Overweight Kids Alone.”

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