The problem of childhood obesity has been in the news lately. Commenting on an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Theodore Dalrymple noted that parents were conspicuous by their absence in that prestigious medical journal’s account of the problem. And a Slate on-line magazine article, while sparing no detail of gastric bypass procedures for kids, spared the potential hurt feelings of parents by making no mention of them.
My amateur diagnosis is that the childhood obesity problem is a direct result of the whole constellation of social changes initiated by the sixties. Working mothers, feminism and zero population growth all played a role.
Mary Eberstadt takes up the working mother problem in her important book, Home Alone America. In the chapter called, “Why Dick and Jane are Fat,”