A certain Dudley Dursley is portrayed as a nasty person...

A professor from the UK has written in a widely read literary publication that many different children’s books are “demonizing” overweight and obese children by always portraying bad and unsavoury characters as fat. Professor Jean Webb noted that even very popular and widely read books like Harry Potter and the Billy Bunter books they always showed the overweight children to be unpleasant and greedy.

In the Harry Potter series of books for example, one character a certain Dudley Dursley is portrayed as a nasty person and his obesity is highlighted as a character weakness. The professor who hails from the University of Worcester said the authors who use overweight characters for this purpose are giving the impression that all overweight people are not pleasant people and this can lead to overweight people being marginalised by society and stigmatised.

There is a great discussion about whether it is right to make overweight children feel that they are different from normal weight children. Some people argue that by highlighting the differences you are merely victimising the child and not helping the situation at all, whereas on the other side of the discussion people say that in order for the problem to be dealt with the child must be aware that he is overweight and that it is not beneficial for him or her to be like that.

In the United Kingdom recently there was a lot of noise made as plans were initiated to weigh all school children, so that information about childhood obesity could be evaluated. Many parents objected to this weighing as they said their children would be embarrassed and humiliated and would therefore be the focus of bullying if they were weighed at school.

At Ukmedix News we believe that it is not the children who need to be spoken to directly but the parents who need to be informed about their child’s obesity as they are the ones in the actual position to do the most. Nevertheless some parents still are very touchy about being told that their children are anything but perfect and this can cause a problem. Statistics show that obese children are far more likely to grow up obese and stay that way all of their lives.