Integrated School Health Tip#7: Sugar Mamas and Sugar Daddies

Nope. Sorry. This is not that rich man you were hoping to find on match.com or the gorgeous female widower heiress who has suddenly taken a liking to you. These are real people who are part of a real problem: childhood obesity.

If you work in schools or other institutions that serve youth or live in a neighborhood with kids you have met these people. She is the teacher with the great big jar of candy on her desk or the counselor who hands out mountain dew as part of the counseling session. I used to look at these people as relatively harmless. They just wanted to make kids feel good. Sugar tastes good. Sugar makes kids feel good. What's the problem?

Now I see sugar mamas and sugar daddies as part of the problem.

It seems so innocuous. It's hard to connect that friendly face handing out soda pops and candy bars to a lifetime of diabetes and all its complications but that's the way we need to start seeing these people. The statistics are in. Over 350,000 people die from obesity related causes. This is second only to tobacco with its approximately 450,000 victims.

From a strictly behavioral standpoint rewards are a bad idea. It reduces children to the status of dogs being trained to fetch a ball.

"Rewards are no more helpful at enhancing achievement than they are at
fostering good values. At least two dozen studies have shown that people
expecting to receive a reward for completing a task (or for doing it successfully)
simply do not perform as well as those who expect nothing (Kohn, 1993)."

 

Of the many ways to change behavior, punishment and reward are the least effective. Our overflowing prison systems are ample evidence of this. I still remember an incident from my own junior high experience back in 1975. I was sitting on the table in the cafeteria. A male teacher walked by and told me to get off the table.Like a good teenager I did so until he left. As soon as he was out of sight I sat back on the table. He came by two more times and each time I was sitting on the table. After the third time he marched me to his room and gave me a "hack." For the uninitiated, a "hack" was a legal form of physical abuse back in those days.In my school it was the males who administered this abuse.They took great pride in their prowess and each had their own special wooden board. You generally were forced to grab your ankles and then endure at least one swat with a wooden paddle.

This changed nothing for me. But I did learn to keep a wary eye out for that teacher in much the same way I would watch for the school bully.

 

Rewards and bribes are just the flip side of punishment. They elicit the same range of emotional responses.Kids who do not get a reward while others do endure the same level of shame and embarrassment as does the child who is publicly punished.

 

This is all well known psychology. I am not making news here.

 

I hear a variety of rationalizations from the sugar mamas and daddies. One person tells me she does it so kids will come into her office and talk to her. In my over 25 years of youth work I have never had to bribe a kid to come into my office with anything. I have always had a steady stream of young clients. Another teacher explains that if he doesn't have his soda reward system he can't get the kids to do anything. I have a radical response to this now. I used to be more tactful.

If you have to bribe kids with soda or candy to get them to do something, perhaps you should consider another profession.

In my years as an alcohol, tobacco, alcohol and other drug counselor I am always asked what I consider to be the gateway drug. I inevitably point to the pop machine. Pepsi and Coke, not marijuana and cigarettes are the original gateway drugs. They set up the brain's reward centers for addiction on multiple levels. If you doubt this, think about what happens when alcoholics quit drinking and smokers quit smoking. Their sugar intake increases. They revert to the source addiction.

 

You may know my thinking by now: With the lifetime of health risks and misery obese children will endure I see sugar mamas and sugar daddies as just different types of dealers. If we feel a need to contribute to their diabetes because of our own lack of skills we need to rethink everything, perhaps even the entire school system but that's a longer essay.