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What's Eating Our Kids
An Emotional Component to Obesity?
By Kelly Burgess
"In our work with children we noticed that a high proportion of the kids coming into residential care had eating concerns, and those kids were typically under a great deal of stress," O'Donnell says. "It wasn't such a stretch to see the problem [of obesity] through the continuum of community-based care programs where we serve kids in their homes and in foster care homes."
O'Donnell goes on to cite a survey conducted by the KidsPeace Lee Salk Center for Research of 1,023 American children between the ages of 10 and 13, which found the following:
- 54 percent fear they may contract AIDS.
- Four in 10 children as young as 10 believe they may fall into the traps of early pregnancy, unwed parenthood, drugs or alcohol.
- 45 percent fear they will be physically or sexually abused.
- 51 percent are worried about their own deaths.
- 47 percent say they are afraid they might be unhappy in life.
O'Donnell worries that these types of fears in such a young population could be leading to self-destructive behaviors such as overeating.
Devil's Advocate
While O'Donnell puts forth an intriguing premise, it's one that Dr. Sylvia Rimm disagrees with. Dr. Rimm is a child psychologist and the author of Rescuing the Emotional Lives of Overweight Children (Rodale Books, 2004), which was based upon her groundbreaking study of 5,400 middle school students. It was the first research to shed some light on the emotional effects of being overweight. 
