Social Competence Essay

Social Competence and Obesity in Elementary School Dr. Jackson article “social competence and Obesity in Elementary School, was on a previous studied she had done. In this article she’s looking to see if there’s a relationship between Social competence and obesity. The goal of this study was to understand if there’s anyway, shape or form that obesity can effects a child social competence and vise versus. According to Sandra social competence is essential in a child social, cognitive and emotional development. Participants in Dr. Jackson studies were 8346 children from ages 8 to 12. She focused was mostly on third and fifth graders. To minimize inaccuracy in her finding, Dr. Jackson used data from the U.S Early childhood Longitudinal Study

By the time they were in fifth grade at age 11, there were increase in both the overweigh and obese rates. They were 24% of them were overweight and 14% were obese. Data from the social competence test indicated that there was a slight decrease in self-assessed social competence between third and fifth grade. Its clear to say that children often become self-critical as they grow older. “ Just like the Cooley’s framework of the looking glass self theorizes that people define and evaluate themselves in respond to how others perceive them and respond to them (Jackson 153).” Because these kiids are being look down on by their peers, they starts to believe that they are nothing. They starts to believe that they are losers, that they can not change, no matter what they do they are always going to be fat and trying to change that is just them wasting their time. So instead of changing their habits the accept it and containous to eat and live unhealthy. They don’t engage in any social activies or physical activities, because they afraid of being laugh at of they are not good at it or if they make mistake. In other words, obesity may result in negative social feedback internalized as negative self-concepts, lower self-confidence and poorer social