Childhood obesity: can the scale weigh popularity?

ABSTRACT

In hypothetical playmate preference tasks, obese figures are rarely picked up as friends. This study aims to observe what happens in real life and examine the relationship between body-size and social status in children. Four-hundred and fourteen children aged 5, 7 and 9 years were given a sociometric test. The Body Mass Index (BMI) of each child was calculated. Children were classified as average, popular or with a negative social status. A negative association between body-size and popularity was found. Popular children had the lowest mean BMI, while neglected and rejected children had the highest. Not a single obese child was found to be popular while overweight children had more chances to be popular with increasing age. The findings suggest that obesity is a risk factor for children’s social development as early as preschool age.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood obesity
• obesity stigma
• social status
• social development
• popularity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ekaterina Kornilaki is an assistant professor of developmental psychology in the Department of Preschool Education, University of Crete, Greece. She teaches courses on developmental psychology and children’s mathematical thinking. Her research interests focus on social and emotional development, the psychosocial consequences of obesity and the understanding of death concepts.

Helen Cheng completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at the University College London. She has held posts at King’s College London, Birkbeck College London and UCL Institute of Education. She has built her research expertise in areas of young people’s health and well-being, children’s cognitive development and behavioural adjustment, and social attitudes and trust. Her recent roles include consultancy work at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, investigating child abuse and neglect in children from minority ethnic backgrounds in the UK, and consultancy at the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services Evidence Based Practice Unit, UCL and Anna Freud Centre, writing reviews on child and young people mental health measures and practice. She currently is co-designing a number of studies for the Health and Well-being in the East and West project at the UCL, to examine the impact of global economic changes on young people’s health and well-being.

ORCID

Ekaterina N. Kornilaki http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1723-7453

Notes

1 Although the terms ‘overweight’ and ‘obesity’ are often used as synonyms, they refer to different medical conditions. Overweight are the adults with BMI between 25 and 29.9, while obese are those with BMI above 30, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO, 1995).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Special Account for Research Funds of University of Crete (SARF UoC) [K.A. 3864 and K.A.2760].