Playground taunts force children aged nine to go on diet

Children as young as nine are going on diets after being taunted at school about being fat despite the fact that many of them are normal weight for their age, psychologists said yesterday.

Children as young as nine are going on diets after being taunted at school about being fat despite the fact that many of them are normal weight for their age, psychologists said yesterday.

Such an early initiation into the diet culture can act as a trigger for eating disorders including excessive weight control and bulimia during adolescence in girls, they said.

A study by psychologists at Leeds University found 21 per cent of girls and 16 per cent of boys of primary school age were teased and taunted at being overweight, causing loss of self-esteem. Twenty per cent of the 383 nine-year-olds questioned said they were bullied because of their body shape, although only half of them were clinically overweight or obese.

Girls were more likely to be socially excluded by whispering campaigns and teasing, and boys would be subject to direct insults as well as threats of physical assault. Dr Andrew Hill, who conducted the research with Clea Waterson, said peer pressure among girls to look a certain shape was more insidious than that experienced by boys.

"Personal identities are achieved through peer interaction and while girls have the ability to be supportive to each other, they can also be incredibly divisive," he said. "It also happens at an earlier age among girls because they reach physical and psychological maturity earlier."

The researchers hope the study, to be presented at the London International Eating Disorder Conference tomorrow, will help teachers and support staff to identify and eliminate bullying.

Last week, a report by the Institute of Child Health found that children's average waist size had increased by two inches in 10 years. Dr Carolyn Summerbell, an expert in child obesity at Teesside University, said it needed to be tackled by healthy eating and physical activity. "One of the things you do not want to happen is to make a child who is overweight feel isolated or unusual," she said.

Childline, which takes 20,000 calls a year from bullied children, urged parents and older siblings to take the lead in discouraging younger children from teasing people about their weight. The actress Kate Winslet has said she was subjected to taunts. "As a teenager, I became shy because I was overweight and called 'Blubber'," she said.