Blog Entry #4: Reflection on Round Tables

March 17, 2011 at 11:12 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

PART ONE

1. I believe that in order to address the issue of childhood obesity everyone needs to take responsibility for their contributions to this issue as opposed to try to point the finger at someone else and pass on the blame for this epidemic. The way I look at it, society and the media is responsible for putting products that cause a child to become obese, but we as a society have the responsibility to stay away from those products and keep our children away from those things as well to keep children from forming unhealthy habits that become an unhealthy regimen that causes obesity in further years. One thing that I thought was useful is to speak to children of the unhealthy effects of these foods and lack of exercise from a young age so they will be more likely to make smarter and healthier decisions in their future when the parent isn’t there to monitor their child’s food.
2. I found our team to be very respectful and open to other perspectives to different opinions. When researching, we brought up different points of view when it came to social responsibility, and ways to take on the problem of childhood obesity and I found that every time this came up, the group was willing to listen to all points of view before we reached any decisions and incorporated different thoughts from all of us when creating solutions or ideas to the issue.
3. I believe that in my team we were all very aware of people’s responsibility when it came to this problem and we were considerate of the different factors that contributed to this problem other than simply pointing the finger at parents and dropping all responsibility on them. As we researched, we realized that with there being so many factors to this problem, it didn’t make a lot of sense to try to focus on the root of the problem as being one thing when clearly multiple aspects need to be changed in order to accomplish change.

PART TWO

1. After we heard the reports back from the different groups that provided different thoughts and issues amongst the epidemic of childhood obesity, I think that something has to be done in order to convince people to stop eating so much food that is high in calorie content along with the lack of exercise which teaches children to adapt to this lifestyle and creates habits for the rest of their life. An important factor came up in the presentation of our group, which was group five. One of the group mates came up with the idea of developing a tax on fast food, much like the taxes that were developed for people that purchase cigarettes.

By imposing a tax like these, people would be encouraged to stop eating as much as this food and these taxes could be used towards making healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables accessible to families with limited incomes. Because fast food is so quick and cheap, people are tempted to eat this food on a daily basis, but if healthier foods became more accessible and information of the health benefits that people would have by consuming these foods people might be inspired and encouraged to create change for their children and themselves.

PART THREE

1. I feel that that my role in our roundtable was helpful and offered a helpful contribution to our group. I researched the school responsibility in childhood obesity and by researching this I was able to offer an important factor to why obesity cannot be fully blamed on parents and why it’s unreasonable to try to pinpoint the problem when change is more important than the root of the problem at this point. While presenting, I feel that the information that I had and the information that one of my fellow team mates helped find controversial information of whether schools were responsible or whether it was the parent’s responsibility.
2. Looking at the way that our presentation and work came together I think that we worked well as a team. Although we presented a week early which made us speed up the process of our research, we all contributed on time and maintained contact in order to be able to have all the work completed and to know our individual research to make sure that we all had accurate information that was linked and provided a solid line of information to report back to our classmates. If we couldn’t make it to meetings we always made sure to contact by email or phone and that helped us create a positive learning environment and succeed as a team.

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