A child may have been temperamentally difficult, hard to reach and hard to discipline so parents have used food to comfort, connect or subdue. Parents may have been frightened by a child's early health problems and have overfed because of anxiety about the child's survival. But overfeeding is not common. To overfeed, parents have to consistently feed beyond the child's signs of fulness, meal after meal, day after day. Children compensate they make up for parents errors in feeding by not getting hungry as quickly or by eating less the next time.
Children can overeat or under-exercise because they are stressed.
The alarming statistics about the increase in child obesity are heavily weighted by children who are living in poverty, in geographical areas where children are not safe. Finally, children often overeat because they are afraid they aren't going to get enough to eat. Children who live day after day with food insecurity eat as much as they can get, when they can get it. Children whose parents limit their food intake for fear they will get fat do the same. Children whose food intake is restricted tend to get fatter, not thinner, as they get older.