September was Childhood Obesity Month and American not-for-profit healthcare organisation Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta has certainly got people talking about child health matters with their provocative and controversial Strong4Life campaign.

The ‘tough love’ campaign, which includes billboard, online and television advertisements, features overweight child models who are suffering with related medical concerns or associated social issues, such as bullying. For example, in one advertisement a child model says: “I don’t like going to school because all the other kids pick on me, it hurts my feelings.” Another asks: “Mom, why am I fat?”

There is no question that the advertisements are getting a lot of attention, and therefore raising awareness of the kind of health problems that becoming overweight can cause for children, but with slogans such as “Fat kids become fat adults” and “Warning: Being fat takes the fun out of being a kid”, it may be felt that the language is too negative and could, in a worst case scenario, even end up hurting the very children that it is intended to help. By displaying large posters of already bullied children on billboards, and using words like “fat” and “obese” to describe them, some are expressing the view that the advertising campaign could lead to further marginalisation of children in the community who are overweight.

Public Relations Director for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), Peggy Howell, has described the advertisements as “extraordinarily harmful”. She is quoted in an article on the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange website as saying: “Labelling a person of any age as obese, especially a child or adolescent, is strongly pejorative and counterproductive.” She goes on: “NAAFA challenges the Georgia Children’s Health Alliance to create an advertising campaign that encourages people of all sizes to eat healthy food, add movement to our lives and celebrate our differences.”

Senior vice president at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Linda Matzigkeit, disagrees. “With nearly 40 percent of the children in Georgia overweight or obese, we needed to do a wakeup call,” she says. “This is a medical crisis and if we don’t address it, it’s going to have a huge impact on our state because these children will become obese adults.”

UK modelling agency Models Direct is a great believer in prioritising health matters but we also believe in promoting an inclusive attitude to every shape and size, and we would like to know what you think of hard hitting advertising like the Strong4Life campaign.

Is the Strong4Life campaign teaching vulnerable children to hate their bodies, or is it a reasonable and necessary response to a genuine health crisis that gives overweight children a voice and helps them to realise that they are not alone?