- Introduction
- Obesity is a medical condition that has become popular and has affected people’s health, especially children. Obesity occurs due to excess accumulation of fats in the body, which may lead to unpleasant effects such as low life expectancy.
- Obese children and adolescents are at risk of contracting cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, low self-esteem, poor performance in school, and psychological distress. This indicates that if obesity is unattended to, it can bring severe health complications to children.
- Childhood obesity has increased substantially over the past three decades, with about 170 million children estimated to be overweight. The severe health implications have made obesity become one of the most severe health challenges in the 21st century. The World Health Organization set up the Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity, and Health, in 2004 to address the obesity problem. The movement focused on laying strategies to improve global diet and physical activity behaviors.
- Family-based programs have emerged; they involve educating parents on diet and physical activity to help reduce the childhood obesity (Kiess, Marcus & Wabitsch, 2004). There have been a number of government organizations, which have targeted school-going children to research on causes of obesity.
Thesis Statement: Obese children are prejudiced by other children thus resulting in peer rejection. They are targets of societal stigmatization just because of their size, and this has led to an increase in suicides in obese children (Day, 2011).
- Research has been done on demographic characteristics of obese children’s attitudes. There are stereotypes on both adult and child obesity targets regardless of their gender, age or weight.
- In the school setting, peers are not the only sources of stigmatization but also adults. Teachers do not want to associate with children who have weight problems because it is assumed that the obese children compensate for lack of love and attention from their parents by drowning their sorrows in food.
- Social imagination according to American sociologist C. Wright Mills (2007), it is “the capacity to shift from one perspective to another, from the political to the psychologist; from examination of a single family for comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment. To shift from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry.” In simpler terms, sociological imagination is the vivid knowledge of the relationship between experience and the wider society.
- Every social problem has the following four components (Bryant & Peck, 2007):
- The social problem should cause mental or physical damage to a society or individuals,
- It should have been persistent for a period of time,
- The problem should also offend the standards or values of a substantial segment of society,
- It should propose solutions for how to solve the problem.
- Literature review
- Recent studies indicate that childhood obesity contributes to some adult chronic diseases such as cancer and heart failure. Life expectancy for obese children is relatively lower than that of normal children (Haerens, 2012).
- The obesity challenge leads to psychosocial problems such as discrimination and low self-esteem. It is essential to establish the causes and means to eradicate the challenge (Haerens, 2012). This can be done by educating parents on proper diets and essential physical activities for their children.
- Data and methods
- The data to be collected on child obesity is done for two main reasons: to make decisions and conclusions on both an individual and on a group level.
- The sources of data may include official statistical sources such as data collected by the National Diet and Nutrition survey, World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Food Programme (UNFP) and academic research such as sample surveys carried out by groups who are against segregation among obese people.
- In this research, primary data may be collected from persons who are experiencing or have experienced the segregation that comes with obesity in their lives. This can be done by means of interviews, observations or questionnaires. Secondary data may also be used for this study.
- Theory
- The conflict paradigm explains all the inequalities that exist because of the master status; it is because of these inequalities that social differences are found in every society.
- The functionalist paradigm describes a society as being stable, and explains the mechanisms and factors that stabilize it (Mills, 2007). This theory argues that the societal framework defines a structure’s stability or instability. This theory best explains how institutions in a society such as the family, education and religion work together in creating social balance and solidarity.
References
Bryant, C. D., & Peck, D. L. (2007). 21st century sociology: a reference handbook. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.
Day, A. (2011). Believing in belonging: belief and social identity in the modern world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haerens, M. (2012). Obesity. Detroit: Greenhaven Press.
Kiess, W., Marcus, C., & Wabitsch, M. (2004). Obesity in childhood and adolescence. Basel: Karger.
Mills, C. W. (2007). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
