Jan 29 2009
Big Body, Small Self-Esteem?
I can understand how school performance could influence how a child feels about him or herself. Children spend a great deal of time in school — it’s a huge part of their lives. They are graded on every test, every paper, every class, every semester. Grades are how we measure them. And grades only mean something in the context of their peers. Is one child ahead of or behind the others? When children perform poorly it seems natural they may feel “lesser.” Couple that with the reality of the kudos, acclaim and smiles the high-performers get, while the low-performers get fewer, none, or worse . . . .
I can similarly understand how obese children would stand out among their peers, and not in a good way. The result may be fewer perceptions and feelings of being wanted and accepted. Of course, all children and their circumstances are different. No two children respond in the same way.
While I can understand how there could be relationships between the above variables, I realize I could be wrong. Until we find a way to measure and test, it’s just conjecture. While the article, School Performance And Body Weight Affects Kids’ Self-esteem, Study Shows provided some evidence for what seems to be sensible connections between the variables, I hesitate to declare, “That seals it!”
Here’s what the researchers did -
University of Alberta researcher Paul Veugelers is one of the few in the scientific world taking a comprehensive look at this issue. In his latest study he surveyed 5,000 Grade 5 students in Nova Scotia and asked questions about self esteem, measured height and weight and linked that data with the students’ standardized provincial exams.
And he found -
body weight affects children’s self esteem. But that effect doesn’t go both ways like it often can in adults. Children who have low self esteem don’t necessarily end up putting on weight and becoming obese, he found. His study also shows that youth who perform well in school have higher self esteem, but those with low confidence didn’t seem to let it affect their learning.
Although the article doesn’t spell out whether Veugelers (nice French name: Voo-gway-years) tracked the students through the school year, but to come to those conclusions he must have. Otherwise the data would be just one snapshot in time. The snapshot might reveal a possible connection, but not influence. If heavy kids reported lower self-esteem it would not be clear whether their weight caused their low self-esteem, or the inverse, or whether some other factor influenced both weight and self-esteem.
But if you track students through time and find that those with increasing weight also experience a decreasing self-esteem, you could be more confident (but not fully certain) that what you’ve got is a causal relationship: that one variable did, indeed, influence the other.
Of course, an influence can be indirect. While it may appear that A causes B; later digging may reveal that A causes X which causes B.
In terms of academics and weight affecting self-esteem, my hunch is that the crucial “X” variable consist of perceptions of social consequences.
The truth is, we don’t really understand what self-esteem is. It’s a fuzzy variable. Thus the results of any research conducted with it cannot bring any relation into full clarity.
