“Mommy-see, mommy-do”: perceptions of intergenerational “obesity” transmission among lower-income, higher-weight, rural midwestern American women

Abstract

Public health and media discourses frequently blame mothers for the size of their children, including parents coping with multiple structural disadvantages. Rural Midwestern American, low-income, self-identified higher-weight women (n = 25) participated in face-to-face, audio-recorded, semi-structured interviews about their beliefs regarding how body size is transmitted across generations. We analyzed interviews using causation coding. Participants facing socioeconomic and geographic barriers to salutogenic lifestyles de-emphasized genetic and epigenetic factors in body size. Instead, participants focused on parents’ role modeling, provision of “obesogenic” foods, and failure to enact protective behaviors like providing non-“obesogenic” foods and limiting children’s screen time. Findings demonstrate that the moralization of childhood “obesity” is pervasive, and these damaging discourses have been taken up among those facing socioeconomic disadvantage.

Keywords:

• Mother blame
• parental feeding
• childhood “obesity”
• critical weight studies
• food insecurity

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to participants for their involvement and to Kelsey Mann for her assistance with manuscript preparation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We use fat non-pejoratively throughout the manuscript in keeping with a politicized reclamation of the term and use “obesity” when referring to the medicalized or clinical term of having a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or above to highlight the term’s contentious and political nature (Meadows and Daníelsdóttir 2016)

2 All participant names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

Funding provided by a Central Michigan University Early Career Grant awarded to AB.