Preface

• DOI: 10.1177/0002716207309670
• Date: 01 January 2008
• Published date: 01 January 2008
• Subject Matter: Articles

6 ANNALS, AAPSS, 615, January 2008

This special issue of The Annals is dedicated

to exploring the topic of childhood over-

weight and obesity. It brings together researchers,

practitioners, and policy makers in a forum

designed to identify the contexts of a child’s life

that help to determine weight status, including

the home, the community, and the school, as well

as the larger contexts of children’s development

influenced by media and culture. The approach

we take in this forum reflects the great tradition

of The Annals—we have the unique opportu-

nity to bring to bear numerous disciplinary

perspectives to inform the causes and conse-

quences of childhood overweight, and collectively

we are inspired to use our expertise to make

empirically based, creative suggestions for

strategies to overcome the problem. Our authors

are health care practitioners, social scientists,

philanthropists, advocates, and policy makers.

Where else but in The Annals could such a

group of distinguished influentials come

together?

As the authors who have written for this vol-

ume argue, the problem of childhood over-

weight has reached near-epidemic proportions

in the United States. The Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention (CDC)—a federal

agency that has tracked the prevalence of over-

weight across the decades—finds that the num-

ber of children who are obese (at or above the

95th percentile for age- and gender-adjusted

height and weight) has tripled since the 1970s.

Preface

By

AMY B. JORDAN

Amy B. Jordan is director of the Media and the

Developing Child sector of the Annenberg Public Policy

Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the

coauthor (with Victor Strasburger and Barbara Wilson)

of Children, Adolescents and the Media (Sage Publica-

tions, forthcoming in 2008) and coeditor (with Sandra

Calvert) of Children in the Digital Age (Greenwood Press,

2002). She received the International Communications

Association award for Most Important Applied/Policy

Research (2001) for her work on the implementation

and impact of federal children’s television regulations.

DOI: 10.1177/0002716207309670