Your Momma Likes Big Butts and She Cannot Lie

Your mom, she likes you. She's a big fan. She thinks you're awfully sharp and a real hoot at the dinner table. And she'll keep thinking this even as the patio swing snaps its chains and plummets through the veranda. Because parents just don't understand that their kids might be fat, (or, for that matter, sort of dumb, or complete assholes) according to findings just presented at the American College of Gastroenterology's shebang in Orlando (yeah, Orlando. There are levels of irony here that boggle the noggin)

Researchers at the University of Washington mailed surveys to parents whose children were, to use a sort-of-postive you-might-be-a-winner phrasing, in the top 30% of BMI (short for body mass index; it's not just a rapacious music publishing conglomerate). According to the press release,

[E]ven though all of the children had elevated BMI, less than 13 percent of the parents of overweight kids reported their child as currently overweight. Fewer than one-third perceived that their child's risk for adult obesity was above average or very high.

Now, Lunar Weight was a helluva chubster at one point in our physical development, and really only slimmed down thanks to an intensive regimen of not making any money, so we can understand the role that "hope" plays here. But considering the fact that obesity puts you at increased risk for diabetes, cardiovascular disease, having to play catcher in tee-ball, and, according to a recent study in Neurology, eventually becoming a drooling idiot, you'd think some sort of alarm bells would go off in between pinching those nummy apple cheeks.

Yeah, no. That 13% figure indicates a serious lack of actually looking around to see if maybe, just maybe, there's something different about your own lil' fry. A nice hypothesis to our mind is the good old evolutionary psychological one (Now with 87% Less Replicability!), namely that to a parent, it's far more important that your child look like it might have the calorie stores to survive famine, flu, or mom and dad getting strangled in their sleep by gibbons. Stents and thrombolytics and those little snack wafers the diabetic kids got that LW was always jealous about don't enter into it at all.

On the shallow front (in which we are, okay fine, the shock troops), we're likewise less apt to heavily weight our spawn's future ability to snag their own supertasty vehicle for future genetic commingling. Heck, Lunar Weight doubts most poeple are particularly well programmed to think sanely about their kids post-menarche naughty bits at all, with some exceptions.

Still, an ounce of perspective is worth a pound of cure.

No, not a poundcake of cure. Are you even listening?

Fine, fuck it, your kid's a Rockwell painting. Hey, how's your health insurance looking these days?

{from the Thighmasters who constitute the American College of Gastroenterology}