Your Own Family Background

Understanding yourself as a parent starts with looking at your own family when you were growing up. Parents often react to their own childhood experiences by either trying to reproduce them or trying not to make the same mistakes. Either way, it is important to know where you came from to plan where you are going.

Let’s begin by examining your own childhood and the relationship that you’ve had to food and body weight. By answering these questions thoughtfully, you may gain some insights into your current thinking about your child’s food intake and his obesity. You (and your spouse or your child’s other parent) should consider these questions and review your answers together. You might find some similarities in your backgrounds—or some marked differences that could contribute to conflicts or problems in the way each of you approaches your child’s excess weight.

1. When you were growing up, did your family life tend to revolve around food and meals?
2. What about at family gatherings and holidays?
3. At mealtimes, was there always plenty of food on the dining room table?
4. Did your parent(s) place serving dishes on the dinner table so you could easily help yourself to seconds and choose your own portion sizes?
5. Did you often take seconds?
6. Did your parent(s) usually insist that you eat everything on your plate, even when you were no longer hungry?
7. Were you overweight as a child?
8. If “yes,” do you think your excess weight changed your life in any major way? If so, how?
9. Did you often try to lose weight as a child?
10. Were those efforts successful?
11. Were they ever a source of conflict between you and your parents?
12. Were your mother and/or father overweight?
13. Were your grandparents overweight?
14. As a child, were you often preoccupied with thoughts of food during the day?
15. Did you eat secretly so your parent(s) and other family members wouldn’t know how much you ate?
16. If “yes,” how often did you eat this way (for example, daily, weekly)?
17. During your childhood, did your parent(s) sometimes use food as
18. A reward?
19. A bribe?
20. A source of comfort?
21. Were you physically active with regularity as a child?
22. In school?
23. Outside of school?
24. In youth sports (for example, soccer, Little League)?
25. What types of activities did you participate in?
26. Did your family participate in physical activities together?
27. What types of physical activities did you do as a family?
28. If you could change anything about your childhood (as it relates to the issues mentioned herein), what would you change?
29. How do you think your own childhood experiences with food and physical activity influence the way you’re raising your own child today?

Did some of these questions strike a chord with you? In many cultures, for example, food is a very important part of family life. When extended families get together, much of the attention seems to focus on large, high-calorie meals, and as a result, the waistlines of everyone at the dinner table often pay the price.

On the other hand, perhaps you grew up in a family for which money was scarce and there wasn’t a lot of extra food for second helpings—or sometimes even first helpings! These are experiences that will linger with you for a lifetime, and when you have children of your own, you might think, “It’s important for me to make sure my children will always have all the food they want.” As you contemplate the answers to these questions, think about your family’s health history, including whether you, your spouse or your child’s other parent, and other family members have had obesity-related chronic health problems over the years, including heart disease, high cholesterol levels, diabetes, and asthma. These medical histories can provide clues to your own child’s risks and should motivate you to work hard to help your youngster manage his own weight, thus reducing his likelihood of developing chronic illnesses now and in the future.

Use the answers in worksheet #1 as a springboard for family discussion, and help everyone understand what may be driving some of your own concerns about your child’s weight and how you’re trying to deal with them. Maybe you grew up with parents who told you to eat everything on your plate, perhaps using the logic that there were “children starving in China.” As an adult, you know the perils of prompting your youngster to continue eating even after he’s full; if you do it routinely, it can deliver a knockout blow to all of your positive efforts at encouraging weight loss. By sharing the experiences of your own childhood, you may better understand some of the issues that have arisen in your family life today.