Have a New Kid by Friday - Dr Kevin Leman [75]
To prevent overeating and to provide balanced meals for your children, get back to family dinners. Serve healthy, nonfried food, and downsize the amount of food you prepare for dinner. Then, after dinner, close the kitchen to snacks and nighttime raids.
In the mornings before school, make sure that your child has a healthy breakfast. Often children dash out the door without breakfast because the bus or carpool is waiting. Or they grab anything junky that’s easy to take on the road. Then what happens? They get to school, they’re hungry, and they find the vending machines and fill up on Oreo cookies! Add to that the fact that phys ed classes are often being removed from the school curriculum (they’re the first thing to go when there are budget cuts) and that little attention is paid to physical fitness, and you’ve got a weight problem in today’s youth. Even 18-month-old children sit at a table and eat breakfast with a DVD propped in front of them to keep them from tossing food and throwing a fit. Do they really know what—and how much—they are eating? Are we priming our kids to overeat, even from a young age?
To change a child’s overeating habits, you need to change your lifestyle. Sit down for dinner together as a family (this often requires the biggest change in the parents’ schedule). There’s nothing like a home-cooked meal for satisfaction, for lower fat content, and for bonding conversation. So don’t miss out.
There’s another aspect of overeating: bulimia. Ninety percent of the children who struggle with bulimia (overeating, then throwing up to purge the food from their system) are teenage girls. The underlying, driving reason is perfectionism. Teen girls see “perfect” bodies all around them on television, on billboards, in movies, and even within the “popular girls” group. In order to be accepted, they assume they have to be stick thin. If these girls don’t feel supported by their parents, they may find another way to control their world—by binge eating a whole pan of brownies, then gagging themselves in the bathroom so they throw it up. If you suspect or discover this is happening with your child, please get help immediately from a professional. Bulimia is a serious condition that needs to be addressed by health-care providers because of the long-term impact it can have on your child’s overall health—physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Overcautiousness
“Mindy is afraid to try anything.”
“Before Dave turns his homework in, he checks it over and over and over.”
It’s good to be cautious but not overly cautious. The key word is overly. When kids are overly cautious, perfectionism is in full bloom in your house.
A lot of children who don’t start projects fear that if they do start, they might do them wrong. They fear criticism more than anything else, so the worst thing that parents can do is criticize them. These children live life with a boulder around their neck: I have to produce . . . or else.
How did these children develop this fear? Because parents have used praise rather than encouragement. (For more on this, see the chapter “Thursday.”) They have overused praise with everything the child has done until the child tells himself, I only count in life when I do things perfectly. If I don’t, I’m nothing.
Here’s the surprise. You may have a child who doesn’t look like a perfectionist. He may be always late, his room may be a mess, and he may look like a mess, but underneath it all, he’s a perfectionist. He may get his homework done and get it done right, but then a month later the teacher finds it in his desk at school.
“Why didn’t you turn that in?” you ask. He has no answer, because he doesn’t know how to voice his fear that if he had turned it in, someone would evaluate it. Someone would give it a star or a black mark. And what if it was the black mark? How could he live with that?
If you are constantly praising your children