Sunday, August 31, 2014

Knowing and not Knowing

Lately I have been consumed with ideas around knowing and not knowing, particularly with regard to health issues such as obesity. I think I always assumed that someone knew if their child was overweight or obese. But research shows that knowing whether or not your child is overweight or obese is not that simple, in particular for immigrants to this country. In this article,  UCSF's Linda Rosas (2010) and her colleagues decided to assess the maternal weight perception of mothers in Mexican immigrant communities in California against those of mothers in high emigration areas of Mexico. Basically, the researchers wanted to see whether these mothers could identify the ideal size (not weight) of a child as well as whether they could identify the accurate size of their own child. And so the researchers showed them the Collins Scale . . .


. . . and asked the moms to identify an ideal size for a kid. On average,  Mexican mothers chose a larger-than-ideal body size. The mothers in California, mostly immigrants, generally chose the correct ideal body size. However, when asked to choose the Collins Scale figure that most closely resembled their own child, the Mexican women on average chose a figure that closely resembled their child's size, but the moms in California were staggeringly less likely to choose the right size. In fact, 57% of the the US-residing children were overweight or obese, but only 10% of the mothers chose a figure that corresponded with the size of their child. 

I had this study in mind when I read a short article by Katherine Hobson (2014) on WFYI's Sound Medicine website that synthesized data from a CDC report that came out in this summer. In the report, the CDC shows that 30% of kids in America misperceive their weight. 76% of the kids who were designated as overweight thought they were "about right" and 42% of those who were obese though they were "about right." Sound Medicine doesn't indicate which percentage of participants in the CDC study were Latino/a, but does mention that boys, younger children, and poor children were more likely to misperceive their weight. 

There's so much to unpack here. First, the model itself: 

  • I realize that these figures are based on representations of BMI, but when looking at the scale, I wasn't sure where I fit, either. Female body image in the US is a tricky thing. The scale doesn't account for muscle definition, and some folks just aren't as well-balanced as the Collins figures. So I conducted my own little study using my partner (dangerous, I know). I chose my Collins image, and then asked him to as well, without sharing my answer. We were pretty much spot on, within .25 of each other. So knowing is possible, but it took a long time for me to decide on a figure. 


  • There's something about moving to the United States that makes people think that they (or their children) are of a more ideal size than they actually are. In both Rosas and the CDC study we can see that even when kids are overweight, both kids and parents consistently rate kids as ideal- or average-sized. This is despite the fact that folks in the United States know what an ideal-sized person looks like. This has huge implications for my work in campaigns, as both articles recommend positively framed education as a way to change childhood eating and exercise behaviors as opposed to fat-shaming negative frames. 
These articles introduce some of the ways in which ideas of knowing and not knowing need to be navigated in order to create successful anti-obesity campaigns. Throughout this blog, I will continue to address issues of obesity, particularly amongst children and particularly in immigrant communities where issues of language and culture intersect with health practices.




Hobson, Katherine. "Many Kids Who Are Obese Or Overweight Don't Know It."Sound Medicine. N.p., 23 July 2014. Web. 29 Aug. 2014. <http://soundmedicine.org/post/many-kids-who-are-obese-or-overweight-dont-know-it>.

Rosas, Lisa G., Kim G. Harley, Sylvia Guendelman, Lia Ch Fernald, Fabiola Mejia, and Brenda Eskenazi. "Maternal perception of child weight among Mexicans in California and Mexico." Maternal and Child Health Journal 14.6 (2010): 886-894. Print.