“WARNING: It’s hard to be a little girl if you’re not.”

In a society plagued by the idea that a healthy body image means being exceptionally thin, these new ads don’t help.Those words appear on large billboards underneath a black and white photo of an overweight child as part of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s initiative to end childhood obesity in Georgia.

Polina Marinova

In fact, many of the captions on the print ads closely resemble insults an overweight kid would hear from bullies at school.

“It has to be harsh. If it’s not, nobody’s going to listen,” Linda Matzigkeit, vice president of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, said in an NPR article.

But is being harsh really the way to make people listen?

Georgia has the second highest rate of childhood obesity in the nation following Mississippi. I do think obesity is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, but using scare tactics to solve it is not the solution.

I’ll admit that scare tactics work, but they work to elicit quick and extreme results. And what exactly is this campaign trying to scare kids into doing?

If I were a 10-year-old struggling with weight issues and I saw the daunting posters, I would be scared — scared straight into anorexia or bulimia.

The posters don’t promote exercise or eating healthy food. Instead, they perpetuate stereotypes. The billboard reading, “Fat kids become fat adults,” says nothing except that if you’re fat as a kid, you’ll be fat in 10 years as well.

When a child reads that, they’ll want fast results because no one wants to be called “fat” for the rest of their lives.

I don’t understand why it always has to come down to scare tactics. What happened to health classes in elementary, middle and high schools? I remember spending a good chunk of the course discussing the food pyramid, an active lifestyle and making healthy choices.

Maybe the solution doesn’t have to be achieved through terrifying ads. Maybe Georgia needs to revamp its health education program if kids are still graduating from schools without knowing the difference between healthy and obese.

Scaring people out of doing meth and driving drunk may work, but shaming kids out of eating will have detrimental effects.

And if the campaign does reduce the number of overweight kids, then Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta will have reached its goal of curbing childhood obesity in the state.

But I sincerely hope that in a few years, Georgia doesn’t launch a new campaign combating childhood anorexia.

— Polina Marinova is the managing editor of The Red & Black