More Young Girls Worry About Their Weight
A 10-year-old girl stepped on the scale at her pediatrician's office last week during her annual checkup and was horrified to discover that she had gained weight.
"I asked her if she understood that she needed to gain weight and body fat in order to develop properly," the doctor, who is a specialist in adolescent medicine and a friend of mine, said. "But she just couldn't take her eyes off the scale. There are more and more young girls concerned about their weight. More of them are on a diet. More of them have poor body images."
My friend is far from the only doctor to notice this change, as well as to observe that the average age of children plagued with these concerns is getting younger and younger.
According to the Eating Disorders Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy organization, the incidence of eating disorders has doubled since the 1960s. Although statistics on eating disorders have a larger margin of error compared to other illnesses — due to the fact that patients with these problems tend to be secretive — the National Institute of Mental Health's most recent study in 2001 found that between 5 million and 10 million Americans have eating disorders. These illnesses include anorexia, bulimia, and a newly formed diagnosis, binge eating disorder.
Females are generally thought to comprise around 90% of these cases, although a study published this past February by researchers at Harvard University Medical School found that up to 25% of adults with eating disorders are male. The majority of the people battling eating disorders are adolescents and people in their early 20s.
What's disturbing is that these are no longer problems that begin to manifest themselves in the teenage years. According to figures provided by the country's first residential eating disorder treatment facility, the Renfrew Center, and the Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 40% of 9-year-old girls diet regularly. According to the Harvard Eating Disorder Center in Boston, 42% of first-, second-, and third-grade girls want to be thinner. Eating disorders also have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.
Why are eating disorders on the rise? Why are eating disorders affecting younger and younger children? Why are more boys and men afflicted?
"The number one reason is the media," the pediatrician said. "The kids that star in television shows, the models, the celebrities — they are all extremely thin. Impressionable young children are picking up on the message that the thinner, the better."
She's right. In 1999, Harvard Medical School researchers found a sharp rise in eating disorders in Fiji following the arrival of television on the islands. In 1995, just as television was introduced, researchers found that only 3% of 17-year-old girls reported that they had vomited to control their weight. Three years later, this figure jumped to 15%.
The girls who watched television at least 3 nights a week were 50% more likely than others to see themselves as too fat, and 30% more likely to diet, although the frequent television watchers were not more overweight.
"My daughter constantly talks about how she needs to go on a diet," a mother of three said. "She is 11 years old and going through that awkward phase. Look at those silly celebrities that are popular today for young girls: Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, those Olsen twins. One is more emaciated than the next, and in and out of rehab. I can't shield her from popular culture. I just keep telling her that she's beautiful inside and out, and that often boys and girls are uncomfortable with their bodies as they grow and develop. That it's normal and that I remember also feeling funny and a little unhappy about my body when I was that age."
One mother of a 12-year-old daughter who plays tennis competitively said she is glad her daughter has her tennis coach to talk about such subjects. "My daughter's coach emphasizes balanced eating and a healthy body," the mother said. "I'm relieved she's playing tennis though, because the girls who are still doing ballet and gymnastics have it rough when it comes to these years because the ideal image is so slim and non-curvy. I really just pray we make it out on the other end."
"I would like for the school to address the parents on the subject of eating disorders," an administrator at an all-girls school on the Upper East Side said. "We see girls battling with their body images every day — of course some more seriously than others, and sometimes in the very early years of elementary school. It happens to be a very touchy subject when you have a group of mothers who are fanatical about exercising and dieting and yet do not see themselves as such."
There are no figures to confirm this, but I imagine that the rise in the number of cases of eating disorders, especially of those in pre-teenage girls, is especially sharp in New York City, and not just because doctors are getting better at diagnosing the illness. In New York, it really feels like you can't be too thin.
