to ask why would you overfeed your child?

I have an American friend. She, her DH and her 4 adult children are all very obese. She's a brilliant mum. Her children are her life and she loves them fiercely. She just has no idea about healthy food! Her Facebook feed is full of photos of them eating huge portions of burgers, fries, pancakes, waffles, giant cookies, milkshakes etc. I don't think it would ever occur to her to have something like grilled fish and salad for dinner! To her, food is love. She loves her family by indulging them with food.
I know she's American but I know British families who are the same. Their enture diets are junk food, takeaways, crisps, chocolate, cakes, biscuits. They refer to salads and vegetables as "rabbit food" and seems to think healthy foods are "disgusting".
It's a real problem with bo easy answer. Once you start eating healthily you feel better. You want to eat healthy foods abd unhealthy foods become less appealing. However, many people don't even try. They don't know where to start.

@CautiousLurker01do you have any idea what SS are dealing with? Teachers are often have to ring home to inform parents that something such as a full size tube of Pringles with no other food provided is not a suitable lunch. So this kid is a bit fat and comes in with a biscuit in her hand? It’s not great but it’s definitely not something for SS.
To give you an idea, a primary age child smelling strongly of weed each day no longer meets threshold in our area. There’s just not resources and it’s frankly not that much of an issue to the government. I’ve met some lovely fat children and some odious/ borderline sociopathic children who eat nothing but houmous, kale and rice noodles.

I can’t understand this either - it should be something that nurseries/GPs/HVs can report parents to social services for. Not to condemn or threaten, but because they have parent support services for those who are struggling. This is neglect - it’s failure to research and provide nutritious healthy food and consequently putting this child’s health at risk. Frankly I think it is more likely to be down to parents being uneducated, maybe even intellectually challenged, and possibly lazy. Parents like the ones you describe need an intervention and support so that the child is protected.

@SallyWDexactly, crunchy nut cornflakes, weetabix with sugar, jam, marmalade, pancakes, nearly all have more sugar than we need in them. The plain chocolate ‘o’ type cereal are actually green on the traffic light system, compared to Dorset cereal honey granola

No you’re right. I said chocolate cereal because that’s what the poster asked about and said her son had.
I’d say the same about any high sugar cereal.

Does it being chocolate cereal make it any more unhealthy than other cereals? What's unhealthy is the sugar. Many other cereals have high levels of sugar. The addition of cocoa (which is actually healthy) doesn't make it more unhealthy than non-chocolate cereals which are very sugary. My daughter loves granola but baby granola are shockingly high in sugar. She also likes chocolate weetabix which is lower in sugar.

The adults have poor knowledge/ relationships with food and they pass this on to their children.

as a scooper need to educate about nutrition and encourage healthy food choices .

I don’t think anyone would deny that there is a market for chocolate cereal, or that many children eat it. That doesn’t make it a reasonable breakfast. And it isn’t one I’d give my children.

Now you’re assuming that others all assume people who are slim eat well 😆. I know of plenty of slim adults and children who have a crap diet! Chocolate cereal etc still isn’t a great breakfast for a child to start their day with frequently even if slim.

i have noticed a few things.

Some people really don’t have the first clue about eating properly. I know people who literally live off sweets, takeaways and sugary drinks and they don’t even realise how bad their diet is.

Some people are in complete denial about their or their children’s weight.

Some parents are really struggling whether through poverty, poor mental health, not having the basic skills for parenting and they just do what’s easiest. If that’s shoving the child in a buggy with a chocolate bar at 8am then so be it.

Plus all the chocolate based cereals in the shops prove that there is a market and so MANY children are probably having this for breakfast. In Spain most children have a cake for breakfast (like a madeleine) and a cup of hot chocolate. Yet most children in Spain are slim.

But the fact is none of you would know. Why are we still making basic assumptions that people who are slim eat well and people who are fat do not? When that isn’t the case for many people.

Since you’ve asked, yeah, I am a bit of a judgey pants about children and chocolate cereal or biscuit spread for breakfast, no matter how slim they are. But obviously the majority of the time I have no idea what other people’s children eat for breakfast.

I agree. Chocolate sugary spread, chocolate cereal etc is not a good breakfast at all regardless of weight. Especially if it’s frequently as you say and not the occasional treat.

I have a theory that our way of living has changed faster than we can evolve to cope. How western society lives is very tech driven, vehicle dependent and convenience driven due to time pressures. I have connections to Orkney (still have a house there though live in a suburb of Glasgow). You don’t see fat kids. There will be a few on Orkney no doubt but fat people are unusual. There isn’t as much fast food. Low population means most of us have (them) have two sometimes three part time jobs. Not much point in driving to Kirkwall when walking is easier (tiny streets not built for parking) and very few live far away from the town to justify not walking. The teens are outdoors a lot and spend lots of time in the beaches and farming and the sea are still solid industry as is renewable energy. “Older” style of living. The world around us has moved faster than our MUST STORE FAT genetics can evolve for. Cities seem so disconnected. We don’t talk to our neighbours, we drive everywhere to avoid people and lock ourselves in our homes. Threads in here show much distress people suffer from having neighbours who have audacity to be visible/audible to them. The islands have stronger communities (kinda have to, fairly isolated by sea) and do seem to spend a lot more time out of the home involved with each other. Just a ramble that has crossed my mind 🤣

My DD used to ask for food constantly when she was 2-4 at the same time she would refuse most foods I offered her, as she really just wanted sweets. I think that she was often a bit bored rather than actually hungry. I would offer her a banana or apple but not give in to sweets so she was a healthy weight, but it would have been really easy to give in.

It’s a tough one for sure! My sister was overweight as a child, I’m sure people would have looked at her and wondered what my mum was feeding her. My mum tried everything to be honest and I was always skinny so it wasn’t all her - we had healthy dinners, etc. but there were always “bad” foods in the house. My sister used to harrass my mum for food constantly as a child - she just couldn’t seem to get enough. It’s only something my sister has really got to grips with now, in her thirties. Shes struggled with her weight a lot over the years.

@Perfect28 that may be true but it should have been bloody honest to a health professional what was happening. I don't want to hijack the thread but it was absolutely insane what they had me doing. I had twins as well so I don't think it's as unusual for someone to not have enough milk for 2. They were 4 months old when the one I'm talking about got admitted to hospital for bronchiolitis and a sensible doctor finally sat me down and told me to bottle feed.

@Shwishto be fair to the NHS, the number of women who legitimately don't produce enough milk is absolutely tiny compared with the number who think or get told they can't.

I think there's often a sort of "blindness" that comes with people's kids weight.
When my DS was a young baby he was REALLY underweight due to super bad advice on breastfeeding from NHS (I didn't have enough milk but was repeatedly gaslighted and told not to bottle feed). I was genuinely traumatised by his teeny weight. He was literally on the 0.3 percentile down from about the 50th at birth.
Anyway this stuck with me I think. And when I stared introducing bottles and actually food I genuinely didn't see that he was quite fat!
In fact the first time a family member mentioned it I was outraged. But a doctor confirmed. And I became a lot more sensible in how much I gave him. He's 10.now and lithe and skinny from fairly healthy eating and constant football. But in those early days I honestly didn't know. It was like something flipped in my brain and I was just terrified of him being so thin that I couldn't see anything else.

Because too many people don't understand nutrition or know how to feed themselves properly and then they go on to have children and there are no services or interventions to break the cycle. They likely feed their child that way because they were fed that way, it's pretty simple.

I'm a secondary food teacher, my subject isn't taken seriously. Much needs to change.

my boy is 3 and is 23kg. (my girls were probably about 16kg at his age and very dainty things)

he isn’t over fed. i’ve fed him in exactly the same way that i fed my girls. he eats the same meals as us and has a nursery lunch. he loves fruit and veg and home cooked food and he’s not allowed chocolate or fizzy drinks but i will let him have a packet of crisps or chocolate roll cake now and again.(not daily)

i was overweight as a child, my mom and dad were both overweight so im thinking it’s genetics. he doesn’t look obese he’s tall and broad and chunky and very cute and squeezable.
im constantly worried about it and its not like you can put
a 3 year old on a diet when he already eats healthily

Would you be similarly judgemental about my son though? He frequently has chocolate cereal, or toast with biscuit spread, for breakfast, yet just happens to be very slim

A bit beside the point, but there is another thread running currently. The OP is concerned as her extremely sporty, very healthy eating DD has come in as overweight on the year 6 school BMI check. It just shows that ‘being slim’ in a vacuum is pretty meaningless when you see what some supposedly healthy children (as per what the school care about) eat.

Would you be similarly judgemental about my son though? He frequently has chocolate cereal, or toast with biscuit spread, for breakfast, yet just happens to be very slim

Yes, I would. You're injecting him with sugar first thing in the morning. Just because he's slim now, doesn't mean he'll always be! Slim doesn't automatically equal healthy, either.sorry, bit you did ask and that's my opinion.

@Gandalfatemyhamster
As an overweight parent myself I completely agree. I wouldn’t have an ice cream etc when out with my son.