In recent years, obesity has become a major problem in the U.S. In particular, childhood obesity has risen to alarming rates, with American children becoming fatter at younger ages due to a combination of chronic stress and unhealthy lifestyles. While the ill health effects of obesity are well known, less remarked upon are the social and psychological ramifications of being overweight. Obese children suffer from lower self-esteem due to bullying and concerns over their appearance, which translates into a greater difficulty in making friends and depression. Most importantly, childhood obesity correlates to poorer grades in class. The cumulative nature of social norms, social institutions, social roles, and beliefs/values result in a cascading effect with regard to obese children, resulting in them performing more poorly in school according to all metrics. In order to help students achieve, tacking childhood obesity is important not just for its physical health benefits, but its academic ones.
Studies have consistently shown that children who are overweight or obese tend to receive lower grades than those who are a healthy body weight. Social norms play a significant role in this. Being fat is socially transgressive for a number of reasons, the most important being that people view the obese as unattractive. Normally sized children regard obese boys and girls as less attractive, and because of this, obese people are typically self-conscious and ashamed of their bodies (Au, 2013). To make matters worse, society often perceives overweight people as being lazy and/or gluttonous. The logic goes that if obese people had self-control, they wouldn’t be overweight, which leads people to shun and discredit them. Obese children often feel that their weight precludes their contributions in class from being appreciated, which may lead to them performing less well out of apathy or self-consciousness. Add in bullying to the mix and children have even less of an incentive to perform their best in school (Taras & Potts-Datema, 2005). Bullying often leads to feelings of worthlessness, futility, and depression in children, which has an additional negative impact on their academic performance. So long as the social norm in society is to be fit and skinny, the violation of norms that obese children commit by being overweight will not change.
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The social institutions of school also play a large role in childhood obesity and its impact on grades. Schoolteachers, counselors, and other individuals of authority typically do not adequately understand the struggles that obese children go through. They might simply tell students to lose weight if they are unhappy, or to simply “ignore” the bullying they receive and not let it get them down. This represents an institutional failure due to the fact that neither of these responses solves the problem, and indeed may make it worse (Taras & Potts-Datema, 2005). The breakdown of institutions whose job is to help students achieve in the face of childhood obesity occurs it is something that adults often cannot relate to. Due to the fact that childhood obesity is a relatively recent phenomenon (at least in the rates that it is occurring), social institutions are ill equipped to deal with it. Even parents are often at a loss, and some parents may even berate their own children for being overweight. In order to solve this, a major overhaul of how teachers and other authority figures deal with childhood obesity should be considered.
Another factor as to why obese children perform more poorly in school is due to social roles. Stereotyping is still quite common in society, despite concerted efforts to stamp it out, and the stereotyping that obese people suffer is a compounding factor for school-age children. As mentioned above, people typically stereotype the overweight as being lazy, because they treat girth as the physical expression of sloth (Au, 2013). In the classroom, this results in students perceiving fat children as being unreliable or untrustworthy due to their perceived laziness. Additionally, many people stereotype obese children as lacking self-control, which makes the social roles their peers shunt them into even more confining and negative. Children trapped in negative social roles feel less inclined to achieve due to the fact that they believe that nothing they can do can change their lot in life.
Finally, the beliefs and values of many schools is a major factor in the poor academic achievement of obese children. While changing values in American schools has helped stigmatize bullying and abuse to a certain extent, the perception of fat as being undesirable and bad leads to children devaluing their obese peers (Han, 2012). Obese children also often devalue themselves, believing their lives are of less inherent worth than those who are of normal weight. The feeling of hopelessness induced by their weight and others’ perceptions of it leads them to care less about achieving, not just in the classroom, but in life in general.
Solving the problem of childhood obesity is more urgent than most people think. While the adverse effects of being fat are well-understood, obesity’s effect on academic performance threatens to cast a pall over young students’ lives. Helping solve childhood obesity while also ameliorating its negative effects is a high priority for the educational system. Without a solution to this problem, obese children may have the rest of their lives impacted by being overweight. Solutions will be hard to come by, but finding them is absolutely mandatory in order to safeguard the children of America.
- Au, N. (2013). Childhood obesity and academic performance. Obesity Research & Clinical Practice, 7, e47.
- Han, H. (2012). Childhood obesity and academic achievement (Doctoral dissertation, The University of Wisconsin-Madison).
- Taras, H., & Potts‐Datema, W. (2005). Obesity and student performance at school. Journal of School Health, 75(8), 291-295.
