PHYSICAL GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT IN MIDDLE CHILDHOOD Your textbook barely touches on physical development, but I think it is very important. Children grow more slowly than during early childhood or puberty - they gain about five pounds per year, and the average well-nourished child will be around 70 pounds by age 10. Their strength and coordination improves significantly during this period. Strength and physical development are related to friendship. The child who looks very different, who is significantly overweight or who is not very coordinated (and, consequently, bad at the games that children play) is likely to have a harder time being socially accepted by the other children. During middle childhood, boys and girls are about equal in physical abilities, but there tends to be more encouragement of boys to participate in physical activities. Both boys and girls increase in reaction time, that is the time it takes to respond to a stimulus, like a baseball that was thrown at a person. Reaction time at 14 is approximately half what it is at five. Slow reaction time (which is related to brain maturation) is why you may see a seven-year-old softball player catch a ball in her glove and then drop it. She does not yet have fast enough reaction time to close the glove before the ball falls out. You can honestly encourage your six-year-old that she will get better as she gets older. Whatever sport she does, DO encourage her to get exercise as it is the single most important factor in the prevention and reduction of obsesity.

OBESITY: THE UNDISCUSSED EATING DISORDER

Eating disorders make the news. An Olympic gymnast dies from complications related to anorexia nervosa. A princess reveals her struggles with bulimia. There was a period in the early 1990’s when it seemed that everywhere you looked in the media were dramatic stories of eating disorders deaths from them, celebrities, or even ordinary people, who had over come them. The most common eating disorder in America, though, is obesity. Obesity is defined as being at least 30 percent over normal weight. At least ten percent of American children are obese, meaning they are not just a little, but significantly overweight. Obesity causes many serious problems for children, both physical and psychological. Obese children have more cardiovascular problems, are more likely to become obese adults, have more orthopedic and respiratory problems and are more often social rejected and have low self-esteem. Even if your adorable child has loads of friends and high self-esteem, obesity is still bad for her health. (Are you getting the idea that I am concerned about obesity and think that people don't take it seriously enough?)

Obesity is a serious problem on the reservation. There is a much higher incidence of obesity here than in the population as a whole. In part, this may be due to poverty, although it is true that the upper midwest region as a whole has a higher incidence of obesity than the west coast, for example.
 

What causes obesity? While obese children may be taunted by being called "Piggy", they often, in actual fact, do not eat much more than other children. However, by eating a few more calories every day than they expend, the cumulative effect is a very overweight child.

CAUSES OF OBESITY
(from  The Developing Person through Childhood, by Kathleen Berger & Ross Thompson)
 

• Genetics play a part. Children of obese parents are more likely to become obese themselves.

• Activity level. A second factor is leading a sedentary lifestyle - obese children are less active.

• Types of food. In North America, poor families are more likely to eat foods which are high in fat or fried versus steamed or broiled and to eat starches more than fresh fruits and vegetables. It's simple, really. Macaroni and cheese and peanut butter sandwiches will fill your kids up a lot more cheaply than lettuce and tomatoes.

• Television watching: This relates to both inactivity and the choice of improper foods, since ads are heavily focused on snacks, sugared cereals and soft drinks.

• Overfeeding in infancy and late childhood.
"For most of life, the number of fat cells in a person's body remains relatively constant, no matter what that person eats. .. However, in the prenatal period, and the first two years of life, and again during early adolescence, when total body fat increases in anticipation of the rapid growth that follows, the number of fat cells is likely to increase. ... This is one more reason why fat babies and adolescents become adults who want more food and gain weight more easily than adults who were not overfed as children."

CAUTION: Okay, even though I just quoted that, I want to caution you not to, and not to recommend putting an infant on a diet EVER without consulting a pediatrician or other health care professional. Normal babies have a certain amount of fat. You would be well-advised to check and see if your baby's weight is significantly above average before starting him or her on a diet and do so only under medical supervision. As far as middle childhood, well I have many resources to recommend. Keep reading.
 

• Precipitating event.: A traumatic experience such as moving, death of a parent or divorce can cause children to look to food as a source of comfort.

• Metabolic problems: While you will often hear people use as an excuse for obesity "I (or my child( just have a slow metabolism", in fact, fewer than 1% of cases of obesity are due to physiological problems.

AN EXAMPLE (THREE ACTUALLY)

My three older children are prime examples of these factors at work. One daughter is a cheerleader, on the track team,  and leads a relatively active social life. When she and her friends go out (which is often) they spend hours walking around the malls, with an occasional stop at a movie. She is about average weight, or slightly below.  Her diet is fairly typical for a teenage girl, meaning that sometimes she skips meals because something much more important (in her view, anyway) is going on, and other times she pigs out on junk food.
 
 

My second child, in her own words "hates all sports and you can’t make me like them". Her three favorite pursuits are reading, playing the piano and watching TV. Not only is watching TV a very inactive pasttime, but it is also one during which she spends lots of times eating chips, cereal, ice cream, etc. The numerous commercials promoting such products certainly don’t encourage her to eat healthily. This child is somewhat overweight and would be much more so, I believe, were she not forced by her "mean, terrible, awful mother" to accompany said mother on walks several times a week. She was always a little bit heavier than the other children, but when her father died several years ago, she began eating much more than usual. At the same time, I was working very long hours and her oldest sister was left to babysit. She would yell at Jennifer about eating too much and call her "fatso" and "whale" and similar unflattering comments. Jenn would go to her room and eat three bowls of cereal. Now that I am home a great deal more, and our lives have settled down considerably, her eating habits have become healthier, and she has lost some weight. To the right is a recent picture of her, after having made a serious attempt at getting more exercise and eating less. Now she has somewhat more of a match between her food intake and activity, but, I think the fact that much of her overeating occurred in that late childhood period when fat cells are likely to increase in number, that she has a harder time losing the weight than if her father had died ( and she had consequently begun overeating) a few years earlier or later.

(If you wonder why this picture looks kind of odd, it is because it was taken at The Magic House and she is INSIDE of  a soap bubble. Totally off the topic, but kind of cool, huh? Actually, it really IS on the topic. I think for children and adolescents who are overweight it is important to keep in mind that, "Yes, that is a concern, but there is much more to you than gaining or losing weight."

The third child is very thin. She is extremely involved in sports and has been practicing in one organized sport or another at least ten hours a week since she was six years old. She eats an embarrassing amount. For example, at a birthday party tonight, she ate two pieces of cake and drank SIX boxes of juice. She would have had more if I hadn’t stopped her. In the past year, she has grown four inches taller and gained one pound.
 

VIRTUAL FIELD TRIP # 2   Relax at the computer, take your shoes off!  This is like a field trip you would take in one of your other classes but you don't have to put your coat on, go out in the cold and worry about getting back in time to pick your kids up from day care. The idea is the same as a regular field trip. You go along, observe, and hopefully pick up some useful ideas. CLICK ON ALL OF THE LINKS YOU SEE HERE This link is the table of contents for the Center for Research on Women and Girls in Sports latest report. I would particularly recommend the section on poverty, race and physical ability. In brief, they find that girls who are poor and minorities could benefit most from sports but are least likely to participate. You can see the truth of a lot of what they say by looking around the reservation and seeing how prevalent obesity is and how little participation there is in sports and other physical activity, particularly among girls. Did you ever ask yourself why? This report will give you at least some of the reasons. Current therapies for treating obesity. This link discusses some medical definitions, measures and interventions including various drugs. American Obesity Association. GO TO THIS SITE. I think it is a gold mine of information for those who are just beginning to learn about obesity. Their newsletters are very good, in fact, the article in the link above is from one of them. HOW PARENTS CAN HELP CHILDREN AVOID OBESITY. Very plain page. Very good advice. Excerpts from a Scientific American article on obesity. Specifically mentions obesity and diabetes among the Pima tribal members in the U.S. and Mexico.

There is much, much more I have to say about obesity (and every other topic in this course, for that matter), but I suppose I ought to stop now and move on to the next topic, which is moral development. There is very little on this topic on the next page because, quite frankly, Kohlberg and the whole moral development theory area bores me to death. (What? Was I supposed to lie? Click here to go to the next page, anyway. It's short, there is an interesting exercise in it and a few points I put in because I would feel guilty if I totally ignored the topic.)

Click here to return to the previous page on cognitive development.