Why Parents Shouldn’t Talk About Weight With Their Teens

American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says that number of bathroom scales should not be anxious about.

Obesity and eating disorders in teenagers can be prevented by shifting focus from weight and dieting to encouraging a healthy and balanced lifestyle, researchers said. In 2012, eating disorders caused more than 90 percent of all hospitalizations for children aged 10 to 17 years old, according to data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP).

The focus on weight often drives teens to diet, which is unhealthy, say researchers.

Here are six takeaways from the report, published in the journal Pediatrics.

Golden’s report also highlighted several tips for pediatricians in the role of preventing weight-related problems.

Your diet lecturing may be giving your kid an eating disorder. Teens who diet in ninth grade are three times more likely than their peers to be overweight in 12th grade, for instance.

So how do you strike the right balance between battling obesity and risking eating disorders?

By focusing more on healthy eating and overall lifestyle rather than the amount of food is the key to cultivating a mindset that steers children away from the concern of putting on pounds.

Nearly 40 percent of patients fall under this category, Golden added.

Parents and doctors should not encourage dieting, and should avoid “weight talk” such as commenting on their own weight or their child’s weight. Eating disorders and obesity are often talked about as two separate problems, but they’re not.

“Scientific evidence increasingly shows that for teenagers, dieting is bad news”, states Dr. Neville Golden, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford University and one of the authors of the new guidelines.

“At some point, these patients may have had a real need to lose weight, but things got out of control”, Golden said.

Encourage more frequent family meals.

Parents need to watch negative comments about weight, whether about themselves or someone else. Experts explained that teens take very seriously what you say.

What to do instead:Eat together.

“Over the past 30 years obesity rates have quadrupled in adolescents and the rates of eating disorders, though much lower that rates of obesity, continue to rise”.

One approach that the AAP recommends to health-care providers is Motivational Interviewing, an approach used widely in treating problematic substance use. For example, parents who talk about their own bodies and weights have been shown to inadvertently encourage kids to have more “body dissatisfaction, which we see in half of teen girls and a quarter of boys”, Golden said.

Create a healthy home environment.. These behaviors were dieting, family meals, weight talk, weight teasing, and healthy body image. “We want our kids to know they’re interesting and important no matter what they look like”.