How do you deal with your child's overeating?

Parents walk a fine line between telling their overweight child how to make better food choices and putting too much emphasis on what he is eating. The word DIET has become a dirty word, yet childhood obesity is a big problem. We all know we're supposed to focus on healthy eating but how do we do that when our child is sneaking snacks?
Frank Bruni, in the New York Times, writes about this issue.

The Generation Gap is Shrinking

Parents now have less of a generation gap with their kids. Families are less hierarchal and kids don't respect their their elders just because they are older. While their are differences in how each generation embraces technology and how each generation approaches work, they basically feel a strong connection to each other. Sharon Jayson's article in USA Today talks about the harmony between the generations.

Now our parents are moving in with us!

First it's our grown kids and now it's our parents. When do we get to have fun? It is now the norm to have multiple generations living under one roof because the number of parents moving in with their children increased 67% in the seven years between 2000 and 2007. And this is even before last year's collapse of Wall Street. Ian Yarett writes about this in Newsweek.

Newsweek

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Families now eat and twitter

In the past parents sat down to breakfast and talked. Yes, maybe the kids were cranky and the parents were tired, but they sat across the table and the most the kids read was the cereal box.
Now everyone is plugged in and and checking their facebook or twitter on their phones. The New York Times has an article by Brad Stone about how technology has altered the once predictable rituals at the beginning of the day for many families. Today's struggle is how to get back to low tech.

What you see is not REAL

Talk to your daughters about how magazine covers alter the real image of the person photographed. The media uses photoshop to manipulate us and create an unrealistic vision of beauty and perfection. This is very insidious and affects both mothers and daughters. We compare ourselves to what we see and can't possibly meet the impossible standards. Impossible for a living person. Jeannine Stein exposes this in the Los Angeles Times. Click on the link for the article.

Before you have the next child read this!

US Dept. Of Agriculture calculates that parents can expect to spend $221,190 — $291,570, for the first 17 years of a child's life who is born in 2009. That’s up from $25,229 in 1960, $69,333 in 1980 and $160,140 in 2000. Lisa Belkin writes about this in The New York Times.

Child's play really matters!

How children play is very important. When they are young unstructured play is preferable and as they age, activities are beneficial. Play is crucial to their socialization. The Council on Contemporary Families , a nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing the national conversation about what contemporary families need and how these needs can best be met,
has issued a very informative Fact Sheet on Children's Play.

Journalists keep writing about young adults moving back home

The weakened economy has forced even more adult children to move back with their parents. It's common and happens more and more, yet newspapers keep writing about it as if they've discovered it. Times have changed and twentysomethings are in debt. Faced with the choice between subsidizing your adult child or letting her move back in, most parents prefer the later. It just makes sense to both parents as well as twentysomethings. Andrea Boyarsky wrote about the phenomena for the Staten Island Advance.

Too Close for Comfort is ready for pre-orders!

Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble have our new book, Too Close For Comfort ready for pre-order now. They both offer the book at a great discount and Barnes and Noble offerd another 5% off for pre-orders.

Several behaviors forecast disordered eating.

Overweight youth with certain socio-environmental, psychological, and behavioral tendencies, such as reading magazine articles about dieting, reporting a lack of family connectedness, placing a high importance on weight, and reporting having participated in unhealthy weight control behaviors, are more likely to suffer from eating disorders. Psydir News reports on The University of Minnesota Project on Eating Among Teens (EAT).