Tackling Childhood Obesity
Helping you to help families
We know that the main focus of your work is helping families and coming up with solutions and interventions that aim to ensure that the children in those families are being taken care of appropriately and in ways that will encourage them to flourish. We also know that some families are resentful of the interventions, whilst others are more receptive and recognise that they do need some assistance, and then there are the ones who appear outwardly open to being helped and guided but then their actions seem to indicate otherwise.
At Sharon Heaton professional services, we aim to help you make a difference to the families you work with, especially when they need some support around the issue of childhood obesity.
Case study: Lydia
Lydia was a specialist social worker who became involved in cases where families simply weren't engaging with the interventions that were being introduced by their regular social worker (often as a condition of court orders), and where families were at risk of being separated as a result. Lydia had been assigned a case where the whole family was overweight, but the youngest child in particular was super morbidly obese, and had been instructed to engage with a medical weight loss regime as legal condition. After speaking to the family's regular social worker, Lydia ascertained that mum always seemed willing to engage with whatever the courts had stipulated, she wanted to improve her children's health and her own too, but the reality of this was that over the previous 6 months the weight loss had been minimal, and she admitted that she did not always make her youngest son take his prescribed weight management medication. Lydia came to Sharon looking for ideas for how she could best support the family and how to approach things with them.
After taking some further background information it asking the name of the weight loss medication, Sharon was instantly able to recognise that the medication could be playing a part in things. The drug in question was a drug that required patients to follow an extremely low fat diet - a diet that would not be catered for by school meals, and that would be costly for mum to maintain at home, and certainly too expensive and restrictive to roll out across the family as a whole. Not only this, the side effects of that particular drug were flatulence and fecal incontinence, particularly if the required diet wasn't strictly adhered to. This could potentially mean soiled bedding, the child soiling himself at school, and strong potential that if the child was made to eat his school meal by the school staff, that he would probably have diarrhea all afternoon, and the potential to soil himself. In short the medication that had been prescribed was not entirely suitable for the situation - and through understanding this, Lydia could see how a mother who really wanted to comply with things and help her child, was also placed into a situation that made it extremely difficult to do so, and armed with this information was able to go into the situation in way that allowed her to seem less judgemental and be more empathic with mum, in order to build a good relationship.
Lydia also worked with Sharon on ways to get the whole family involved in their food choices and meal times, as children who are involved in choosing and preparing their own meals are more likely to eat them and enjoy them. They discussed how it was important to ensure that mum felt like she could cope both financially and physically/time wise with whatever suggestions were being made and put into place.
Sharon also helped Lydia to understand more about the reasons why people, especially children, can overeat - looking at factors such as stress or emotional trauma, comfort seeking and dealing with a lack of autonomy and control, and conditions such as ADHD and autism.
Transform the way you work
Whether it's advice around a particular case or client, or a more generalised level of training that can help you and your team to deliver more effective interventions to families who need a significant amount of help around their eating - we can help!
Why not drop us a line and Sharon will get back to you to discuss things and work out a way that will be most effective for your needs.
Why Sharon?
Sharon herself has battled life-long to gain control of her relationship with food, at one point weighing almost 27st (170kg), but now weighing considerably less. After many years of yo-yo dieting, often losing 7st or more, only to regain it all plus more on top, Sharon tried every treatment she could find - slimming clubs, personal trainers, dieticians, group therapy, CBT, CAT, psychotherapy, she even partnered with an eating disorders specialist in the US in an attempt to try to find a lasting solution. Whilst some of the treatments were more effective than others, none provided a lasting solution. Sharon realised that the problem with the treatments on offer was that they all had a tendency to oversimplify the problem, and only focus on one or two aspects of what is much more complex issue. Utilising her own background in psychology and counselling, combined with her experiences, participation is peer support networks, and an ongoing interest in obesity and weight management research, Sharon was finally able to gain a better understanding of the factors associated with morbid obesity which allowed to her help herself, and then go on to help others. By combining her weight management experience with her training in children's counselling and play therapy, Sharon can offer a unique and practical outlook into helping families take control and re-define their eating habits.
