The Bambino Gesù Pediatric Hospital of Rome has communicated the data relating to the diagnoses associated with nutrition and nutrition disorders relating to the last five years. There is a drastic increase both in quantitative terms (overall the clinical activity relating to these cases has increased by 38%) and in qualitative terms (the symptoms that the very young lead to diagnosis are more serious and more early than the debut age). The hospital specialists note that: “In recent years, the younger patients have more serious psychopathological paintings, both for food symptoms and for the associated psychological characteristics. Furthermore, the families of these patients are more suffering, with communication difficulties, greater emotional fragility and compromised overall functioning”, adds.
And it is precisely on this annotation that it is better to stop us to make some reflection. Because what is happening to growth is that the emotional and socio-relational discomfort is increasingly told through the body. A body that becomes the bearer of symptoms and that has been weakened in its game functions, exploration of life and the world. A body that tells a pain of the soul, associated with anxiety, a sense of isolation and impotence, in a world where the very young are increasingly alone and live digital lives in which the body is simply an image and has stopped being “living meat”. All pedagogy and evolutionary psychology tell us that in the first half of our life, everything passes through corporeal experience. But The born in the third millennium are those who have experienced de-corporean existencesin which the body often turns into an empty box that supports few activities in the real world and which contains an increasingly lost mind in the virtual world. In this way, the body-entertainment is skipped which is of fundamental importance for health in evolutionary age and which should see the adult world committed to putting out boys and girls to the center of the real world, promoting the experience of active game and socialization in every possible way.
It is also very interesting to note that the specialists of the Child Jesus indicate, as a further risk factor, the fragility of the family, based on communicative and relational difficulties with compromised overall functioning. It is really true that Today many children live in empty houses, where there is nobody, where you speak and play very little, where everyone is missing within other events and other screens. Minors thus lose that occasion of emotional support and identity refusal that only parents know how to offer since early time. And then, in all this, that body emptied of every sense, also empties of food, internally amplifying the perception of the external void, or saturates food, to make up for another void that does not have the right elements to be filled. And as often happens in many restrictive eating disorders, where it is feared that we are no longer able to control anything, a deadly control is exercised on the only thing that presides over our being in the world: the food that feeds us physically and that becomes a symbol and metaphor of the need for emotional nourishment of which too much experience is made today.
