Recently on Salon, a physician essay about the teen "private chat." From the essay and the comments, some parents and some teens don't want the chat because it's going to be about sex, and since everyone knows that it isn't even private. Which is great cover for the chat the doctor should be having: Kiddo, your parents are fat and you will be too.
This is the chat my physician had with me over the years, except he was clever enough that he didn't tell an eleven-year-old she was fat (and I wasn't, but my mother was). He told me I needed to eat more vegetables. That I should always be concerned about eating more vegetables. My mother did ask me what we talked about (the post-doctor inquisition is apparently standard, per the essay comments) and I don't think she believed me about the vegetables.
We lived in a small town; the physician was well-served by sticking to the vegetable talk and not getting into anything he didn't want to know about. I think the Salon essay is a bit preposterous and presumptuous actually: how much of a safety net is a physician that a child sees once a year? When I got my first yeast infection, I knew what to do from the ads on TV. When a high school friend was raped, she drove to Planned Parenthood in another town. I think they had TV ads also. Now the kids have Google.
The vegetable talk didn't do much for me. My problems were so much larger than vegetables. Neither my parents nor my physician were in a good space to understand the hypoglycemia that made the structured school day so impossible that everyone looked the other way when I ate food behind my opened clamshell desk. Better than having a classmate prop me up for the walk to lunch! I still don't see anything designed to make life for the growing number of children with hypoglycemia/early diabetes better and quite a bit (myplate anyone) to make it worse. It is officially ranked #4 in the tortures of the life of loafingcactus and I wish I could do something about that.
But the vegetable talk was a good idea and ahead of its time. I could see that going somewhere. If it were successful and created the generational reversal that is needed (a generation skinnier than their parents would practically be Woodstalk baby!), I could see parents quizzing the doctor to make sure she only plans to talk about sex.
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