A team of experts has recently determined that children who are bullied over their weight, especially in their preteen years, are highly susceptible of forming a very negative image of themselves and their bodies later on. This in turn opens the door for them to engage in abusive behaviors, such as for examples anorexia or bulimia. The effects of such conditions then extend throughout that person's life, experts say.
An additional side-effect of this type of bullying is that children who are targeted become less willing to pick up a sport, exercise at the gym, or take on an activity that may help them rid the extra pounds.
“There is some research that suggests that, for some kids, weight-related teasing is associated with lower levels of vigorous physical activity,” explains study researcher Timothy D. Nelson.
The expert holds an appointment at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He goes on to say that reluctance to exercise may stem from the fear of being ridiculed while performing physical effort.
The situation is also complicated by the fact that kids can be extremely cruel at times. At to that their seemingly unlimited access to modern communications technologies – which help them bully their victims around the clock – and you get a disastrous mix.
The work appears to suggest that the best time to start anti-bullying prevention programs is while children are in their preteen years. Any later, and the work could be for nothing.
“We tend to think of adolescence as the time when kids become sensitive about their body image, but our findings suggest that the seeds of body dissatisfaction are actually being sown much earlier,” Nelson goes on to say.
“Criticism of weight, in particular, can contribute to issues that go beyond general problems with self-esteem,” adds the scientist, who is also an assistant professor of psychology at the university.
He and his team investigated the cases of nearly 382 public school students, who had an average age of 11. Each of the participants in this investigation had his or her body-mass index (BMI) calculated.
The BMI is used as an indicator to how fat a person is. The scale the research group used ranged from 1 to 7, with the top mark being associated with kids that were very obese.
Preteens “who were teased about their weight saw themselves as bigger and were more dissatisfied with their body size than kids who were not teased, even after we accounted for their actual size,” explains Nelson in an interview for
LiveScience.
The expert and his group published the result of their investigation in the latest issue of the esteemed Journal of Pediatric Psychology.
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