Happy kid, miserable adult… Source: MyKidsTime

Dear parents, please stop rewarding your kids with food!

Alex Anyfantis
6 min readApr 21, 2022

As a former obese child who still has real mental and physical issues with nutrition, I cannot walk past a kid holding an ice-cream or a McDonald’s wrapper without feeling a sense of burning rage.

Body image. It’s something that on some level, we all have trouble with, whether it has to do with being too thin, too tall, too ugly or too fat. Especially nowadays when all you have to do is open one of the myriads of social media apps to see perfect body after perfect body zooming past your screen and make you want to just jump into a hole and hide in there for the rest of your days…

According to a research by breakbingeeating.com, over 50 percent of all adults in the UK, the US, Australia, Germany and France experience social stigma because of their weight.

Now that’s a lot of people!

It all begins from early on

As someone who struggles with their own personal body image ever since a young age, I only have to say one thing: dear parents, stop teaching your kids that food is a reward for a good action!

From early on in our lives, we are bombarded with advertisement after advertisement of snacks, junk food, unhealthy drinks, all sugar-coated (literally!) with happy-looking animal mascots, pretty colours or with the promise of…

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Alex Anyfantis

Media graduate, professional journalist and self-proclaimed Final Fantasy fanboy. Interests (and die-hard passions) include gaming and sports (mainly football).