Early December found me on a cookie-baking spree. I bought a sleek new hand mixer; I clipped recipes for pfeffernuesse and Finnish chestnut fingers, and when the time came, I started rolling out the old family Christmas cookies by the dozen. I was up past midnight, with flour in my hair and colored sugar on the floor and the radio playing quietly in the only lighted room in the house. My husband and children slumbered on upstairs, and I imagined them dreaming vanilla-scented dreams. I felt like such a bountiful purveyor of life's little treats, such a good, sweet mother.

And yet if I were this year's model of the responsible parent, what I should really have felt like, I suppose, was an enabler of gluttony. For as nearly every media outlet has been telling us, American kids are getting fatter. A generation ago, it seems, only 5 percent of children between the ages of 6 and 11 were overweight; today it's nearly 14 percent. The news accounts of this phenomenon have been larded with crisis language -- quiet epidemic, national emergency and so on. And maybe they have a point, given the extent to which obesity contributes to heart disease, diabetes and hypertension. But then they get to the part about "declaring war" on kiddie fat, and they lose me. I picture gimlet-eyed parents hovering over the dinner table with their calorie charts, pinching puppy fat with their calipers, turning their kitchens into no-fry zones, rattling off their children's body mass indexes as readily as their birth dates.

The truth is, the fattening of American children is one of those social developments that the Marxists used to call overdetermined -- its causes are so manifold and so basic as to be inseparable from the way we live. Kids today spend more time in front of a glowing screen and less time in phys ed -- but that's just the beginning. They live amid synergistic marketing so energetic that to ignore it requires an unflagging and nearly ideological determination. Trademarks and mascots hop promiscuously from product to product -- the Trix rabbit shows up on Day-Glo-colored yogurt; Pikachu cutens up prepackaged snack boxes; Oreos transubstantiate into breakfast fare. Even if parents ban junk food at home, their kids are seduced by it at their schools, which negotiate exclusive contracts with cola manufacturers, distribute product-placing textbooks and offer advertising-laden television (Channel One Network) and computer programs (ZapMe!). It's enough to make the search for an obesity gene seem utterly beside the point.

Of course, you can still slim down an individual kid by watching what he eats and nudging him to exercise. And some of the social forces that make children fatter can surely be curbed, too. But what you often get stuck with when you read the experts' advice on this subject are the little, pleasure-killing suggestions: have your kids keep a daily log of what they eat; divide food up into red-light (ice cream, pizza), yellow-light (lean, unfried meats and chicken) and green-light categories (fruits and vegetables and anything with less than 20 calories a serving); make sure their only beverages are skim milk and tap water; turn Halloween into an instructive opportunity to discuss overdependence on sugar.

Yet weren't we supposed to be worried about making our kids too calorie-conscious? Anorexia may have lost out to obesity as the media's current favorite food disorder, but that doesn't mean it has disappeared. Besides, why should children prove any more immune than the rest of us to the paradox that the more Americans seem to obsess about weight, the more they seem to gain it.

In a way, the easy solution, the superficially responsible one, is to deny your kids the treats they clamor for when you're with them -- because who knows what they eat when you're not? But that's the sad solution too. The cliche is the harried, working parents who give in to guilt and go as pliant as Gumby when their kids ask for cookies. But there's such a thing as giving in to pleasure, too, and feeding your kids something they want to eat is one of the most reliable pleasures there is.

There are moments, and they are very sweet, when the pleasures of food and of love are entirely commingled in a way that professional calorie-counters tell us they never should be. Like the other day, when my 3-year-old and I went to Starbucks, expressly for his favorite treat of the moment, chocolate-covered graham crackers. We were in line and he was grinning and hopping up and down on one foot, trying to find the words for something, and then he came out with it: "Mom, you're as sweet as, as sweet as -- a cherry!" I think I recognize what he's feeling -- the anticipation of something delicious, compounded by the knowledge that it's offered with love. It would be a shame if all the urgent alarms about kids and weight -- and all of the conflicting hysterias they induce in concerned parents -- spoiled such moments. Our kids wouldn't be any happier, and I doubt they'd be much healthier either.