Reply to Helping kids learn to manage eating and exercise during the tween and teen years

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[quote=Anonymous]I feel as though I'm seeing lots of threads here about tweens and teens and helping them manage their eating and exercise during these transitional years.  A lot of these posts seem to come from the perspective that something is "wrong" with the young person in question, who gets labeled as a binge eater or overweight, or with the parent posting, who may get accused of being neglectful and a control freak in the same thread.

I know for my 15 year old, that in the past 5 years he has

1) Grew six inches, with an accompanying increase in appetite

2) Started spending large amounts of time alone afterschool, with unrestricted access to the fridge and cabinets

3) Got a job and his own spending money, and the freedom to move around the neighborhood and spend it

4) Went from twice a week PE (public Elementary School) to 5 day a week (public MS, one year of HS) to no days a week (public HS)

5) Moved from playing rec sports year round, with 60 minutes of practice, much of which was spent on socializing, waiting a turn in line, or eating a snack, to periods of intense exercise (e.g. two a day practices in August for his fall sport) and periods of relatively little exercise (e.g. the "off season" for his sport).

6) Naturally shifted from selecting activities that included moderate exercise, like playing on the playground, or riding bikes, or wrestling with the dog, to selecting activities that either involve intense exercise (e.g. going to the gym to lift weights) or none at all (reading, video games).

I suspect that most parents of kids this age will be able to relate.

Given that, I wonder if instead of threads where we debate one particular kid, and pile on the parents and other posters, we could have a thread that recognizes that shifting from parent to child control of one's own eating and exercise, and from childlike exercise habits to mature ones, are universal developmental challenge for this age group, and that, like every other developmental challenge, from toilet training, to learning how to read, to going off to college, there is a wide range of normal, and a wide range of strategies that families use.

Given that, let me start off with a few questions, that I'll answer for myself in the next post

What challenges have you and your child faced in this area?

What strategies have been helpful?

What strategies didn't work?  What would you differently?

What kind of suggestions would you like?

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