Risk Seen in Teasing
Kids About Weight

This article doen't really fit as "PE in the News", but I wanted to post it and I choose to do it here hoping that more of us would be alerted to the real dangers of teasing.

--DLW

By Sufiya Abdur-Rahman
Chicago Tribune staff reporter
Published August 12, 2003

 

Adolescents teased about their weight may be more likely to contemplate and attempt suicide, according to a study released Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

 

Children who are harassed about their weight, whether they are overweight or not, may be more prone to have low self-esteem, be unsatisfied with their bodies and depressed, according to the study.

"It was more the experience of being teased, not the body weight. We were surprised by that finding," said Dr. Marla Eisenberg, a research associate at the University of Minnesota, who led the study.

Researchers surveyed 4,746 Minneapolis-St. Paul public middle school and high school students in 1998 for the study, which appears in the August issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, a JAMA journal. Though Eisenberg said she has not seen any studies that associate such teasing with actual suicide rates, she said her researchers are following up on the students surveyed in 1998 to find out if they are still experiencing the effects of teasing.

Of the 81.5 percent of students who completed the survey, the study found 30 percent of the girls and 24.7 percent of boys were teased by peers about their weight. Another 28.7 percent of girls and 16.1 percent of boys were teased by family members about their weight. And 14.6 percent of
girls and 9.6 percent of boys were teased by both peers and relatives. The adolescents who were teased by both groups reported more emotional health problems than adolescents who were not teased or who were teased by a single source, researchers found.

"I guess what's really sad is that those who are really up on the literature aren't really that surprised to see this result," said Dr. Matt Longjohn of the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children. He said the results are particularly important in Chicago, where some studies found that as many as 40 percent of adolescents are overweight. "What we have to be reducing is the stigma associated with obesity so we essentially take the ammunition away from the bullies," Longjohn said.

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