Fat Daughters, Prejudiced Parent

It’s tough being fat. It’s tougher being a fat girl. And it’s tougher still being a fat girl who wants to go to college.

At least that’s the claim of Christian Crandall, a University of Kansas professor of psychology. His ongoing research suggests that parents are significantly less likely to give financial support for college to overweight daughters than they are to leaner daughters or to their sons, regardless of their weight.

In his latest study, he surveyed 1,029 introductory psychology students, asking them their height, weight, family size and sources of financial support for college. The students were also asked their political orientation, as well as their parents’ ideology.

He found that “heavyweight women were more likely to pay own way through college,” he wrote in the new issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. “This effect was not related to any variables associated with parents’ ability to support their daughters.”

It was the fourth time Crandall has done the study and obtained similar results. But this time he also found that politically conservative parents, as identified by their daughters, were less likely to be supporting their heavyset daughters than were liberal parents - even though conservative parents overall were more likely to be paying for their children’s college educations.

Crandall said that’s consistent with other research suggesting “the more conservative you are, the more you dislike fat people. If you are conservative, you believe what happens to people in life is a function of their own behavior. Getting on welfare is from laziness. Being fat reflects a lack of self-discipline” and so is seen as making heavyset daughters poor risks for college.

(Politically liberal parents aren’t entirely off the hook, he added. They appear to discriminate against their pudgy daughters, too - just not as much.)

Crandall also found that fat works against daughters but not sons. Whether he is fat or reed-thin, parents ponied up cash to send Junior off to college. “Fat is just so much more meaningful for women than for men,” he said.

The impact of fat discrimination by parents isn’t trivial, Crandall claims. Heavy women - those in the top 10 percent in terms of the ratio of their weight to their height - are 50 percent less likely to be in college than averageweight women. Conversely, the leanest 10 percent of all young women are about 50 percent more likely to go to college than the average woman. (Fat guys also are under-represented on college campuses, he said, though the effect is smaller and isn’t because parents don’t pay their way.)

Well, maybe fat people simply aren’t as smart as thin folks. Or maybe corpulent girls don’t want to go to college.

Wrong and wrong, says Crandall. He’s also analyzed data collected from more than 3,000 high school seniors by the University of Michigan and found no relationship between girls’ weights and their grades, test scores, overall health, desire to go to college or intention to apply.

“They’re just not showing up,” he said. “All of these things point to the parents. … I’d like to take these parents and just shake them.”

Unneighborly neighbors

What’s wrong with your neighborhood? Most Americans with a problem in the ‘hood say their biggest complaint is their neighbors, according to a newly released Census Bureau survey of 93,006 households conducted in 1993. Still, a majority of those interviewed said they had no big complaints about their neighborhood.

Biggest Problems in Your Neighborhood: Neighbors 12.7% Noise 8.2 Traffic 7.4 Deteriorating houses/littering 4.3 Undesirable businesses 1.5 Poor government services 1.4 All other problems 10.6. Percent with any problem 38.5

xxxx