The Long, Fat Summer

Remember when there was nothing but reruns to watch on television all summer? Now our kids have 300 channels, TiVo, and a new movie each day from Netflix. Remember how you spent entire days on your bike, with no destination or boundaries? Now most parents wouldn’t dream of leaving their kids so unsupervised, certainly not without a cell phone.

Remember how sorry you felt for the teammate whose parents came to cheer at your games? Now our kids expect an air-conditioned ride to every practice and a full array of parent-provided snacks on the sidelines.

No question—the shape of summer has changed since we were kids. And as a parent, you may wonder whether summer is changing the shape of your kids too.

Since 1980, a summer I spent surgically attached to my ten-speed, the percentage of overweight children in the country has doubled and the percentage of overweight teens has tripled. And though conventional wisdom says summer is the season when kids burn off the extra energy they stored up over the long, cold winter, according to a recent analysis of the body mass indexes of more than 5,000 early elementary students across the country, kids actually put on pounds during the summer more than twice as fast as they did during the school year.

The study, published this spring in the American Journal of Public Health, was limited to kindergarteners and first-graders, so it’s not clear if the same trend applies to older kids. Nor are many experts in the field quite sure what they should conclude from the data. Do the findings mean that schools aren’t doing as badly on the childhood obesity front as we’ve been led to believe? Could it be that there’s something seasonal about the way kids grow? Or might the lazy, unstructured days of summer vacation have the same effect on kids that a cruise ship smorgasbord seems to have on their parents?

Low-income and minority kids are already more likely to be overweight, and some experts wonder whether their problems are compounded when school lets out and the kids have fewer safe places to play and less access to the camps and programmed park-and-rec activities. Kentucky has the nation’s highest childhood obesity rates, with 38 percent of its ten- to seventeen-year-olds weighing in as overweight or obese. Could it be that such high rates are outweighing the somewhat less worrisome weight gains in places such as Minnesota, where “only” 24 percent of kids are considered overweight?

No one is singling out summer as the cause of childhood obesity. But summer is the time of year when parents are more likely to see the rising tide of overweight preschoolers at the pool (in Minnesota, an estimated 13 percent of the kids under the age of five qualify) and notice, thanks to tank tops, a growing number of obese teens (who now make up an estimated 15 to 22 percent of adolescents in the state).

On the bright side, parents have more power than they may realize to help turn back the tide, even during the summer.

Childhood obesity is a complex problem that produces a new headline nearly every week. But Anne Fletcher, a nationally known dietician based in southern Minnesota, says parents shouldn’t be confused by the competing theories about its root causes. “People tend to worry about the micro issues instead of the macro issues, but it’s not rocket science,” says Fletcher. “The bottom line is we eat too much fat, too many refined foods, and more calories than we can burn.”

Fletcher is the author of Weight Loss Confidential: How Teens Lose Weight and Keep It Off—and What They Wish Parents Knew. Though she interviewed more than 100 teens about their weight-loss success stories, she says parents don’t need to go that far to find examples of how quickly “calories in” can outweigh “calories out.” For instance, when her own kids began playing organized sports, Fletcher noticed that parents were often expected to provide beverages and snacks between games. “When I did the math, I figured out they were consuming significantly more calories after the game than they were actually burning on the field,” she says.

On an energetic kid, a few extra calories may not look like a hazard, but they can pile up. Last year, a study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health published in the journal Pediatrics found that every day American kids eat an average of 110 to 165 calories more than their body needs. That’s the caloric equivalent of a can of soda, or half of a doughnut, or a handful of French fries. The problem is, if those extra calories aren’t burned by extra activity, they stay put. As the researchers found, over a ten-year period this so-called  “energy gap” led, on average, to an extra ten pounds of body weight.

Fletcher, who jokes about being a “nutrition witch” in her community, encourages coaches to push healthier snacks for young athletes and keeps a health-conscious eye on school concession stands. While not every parent has the zeal required to do that, Fletcher says it’s much easier to keep nutritious things at home, replacing high-calorie and heavily processed chips, cookies, and soft drinks with fresh fruit and vegetables.

Replacing high-fat food with healthier choices is half the battle—but getting kids to move more is crucial too. Fletcher suggests that instead of flopping on the couch after dinner for a few hours of family screen time (the average American child already spends four hours a day in front of the TV and another half hour playing video games), make a habit of enjoying the extra daylight with a game of basketball in the driveway or whacking a tennis ball against the side of the garage.

Fletcher’s own family offers proof that such adjustments can tip the scales in the right direction. Her son Wes, as described in her book, lost sixty-five pounds when he was a teen.

The roughly 150 extra calories consumed by the average kid every day seems bridgeable. But for overweight teens, that energy gap becomes a chasm. The overweight teens the Harvard researchers studied consumed an average of 700 to 1,000 calories more than they needed every day over a ten-year period, resulting in an average of fifty-eight extra pounds per person. And summer is no help. During the summer months, children who were already overweight actually gained more quickly than other kids.

“Those of us who work with kids who are overweight will tell you that the environment is not set up well for kids to manage their body weight,” says Kerri Boutelle, a University of Minnesota assistant professor of pediatrics who works with both adolescents who are overweight and those who have eating disorders.

Family schedules are so rushed that the average high school student eats with her family only four times a week. Advertising aimed at kids seems to increase their craving for almost everything but carrots. (A recent study in Britain found that overweight kids who watched food advertisements on TV increased their consumption of fatty and sugary foods by more than 100 percent.) The Internet, instant messaging, and iPods make it possible for kids to stay entertained all day in a seated position.

Complicating the problem can be parental fears that talking about our health concerns with a child who’s at risk for obesity may create a separate set of worries about body image or disordered eating. “There’s so much media hype about eating disorders that parents are afraid of swinging kids in that direction,” says Boutelle. “What I can tell you is that thirty years of data on overweight kids suggest that they are actually less likely to develop an eating disorder than the general population.”

Even so, how parents approach the problem can set the tone for long-term improvement—or not. Dianne Neumark–Sztainer, a professor in the U of M’s School of Public Health and the author of “I'm, Like, SO Fat!”: Helping Your Teen Make Healthy Choices about Eating and Exercise in a Weight-Obsessed World, says there is usually no need for parents to confront a child about a weight problem. “The kids are the ones who will bring it up,” she says. “And when they do, parents need to focus strongly on behaviors and not on the weight, which is already so stigmatized.” Rather than try to take twenty pounds off the scale, Neumark-Sztainer says to concentrate on helping your child move toward a healthier lifestyle. Offer to sign her up for tennis lessons, teach her to golf, take her swimming. Enlist his help with the grocery list, bring him along on your next trip to the farmers’ market, teach him how to cook.

Since swimsuit season may be the time when our own body issues rise to the surface, Neumark-Sztainer urges parents to be positive role models for their kids. Don’t tell your daughter how much you obsess about the size of your thighs. Show her how useful sturdy legs are for water-skiing and backpacking. Don’t complain to your son about the size of your love handles. Challenge him to some one-on-one hoops.

“Do more, talk less,” says Neumark–Sztainer. “People love to talk about weight, but the people who are really doing something about it really don’t talk about it that much.” As for taking a bite out of that energy gap this summer, she advises: “Make healthy food choices—and get out there with your kids and enjoy.”  

Laura Billings is a writer who lives in St. Paul. Her health reporting has appeared in Self, Health, Cooking Light, Parenting, and other periodicals.