To wonder about the plus size clothing in next

[MumNWLondon]

Following on from all the threads about taxing fizzy drinks.

I took 4 YO DS to next to buy him some jeans. We picked up almost all the ones they had in an age 4 and headed to the changing room.

I'd describe DS as having normal build for 4 YO, definately not skinny but probably very slightly on thin side of average. Basically normal for 4 YO.

Anyway, noticed once we got to changing room some of the jeans were labelled as being 4+ for pus size kids so we didn't try them on. But even the normal ones were HUGE on the waist and legs, would have required me to really pull the elastic in the waist in and honestly could have fitted both his legs in one of the legs, looked ridicolous. Anyway we did find a skinny fit pair which were fine.

Now I am wondering - how fat would a child have to be to wear the normal fit ones and even more so the plus size one. FInd it quite worrying. AIBU to wonder about the demand for these trousers? There are 20 boys in his class and none of them look fat at all.

My ds's ribs (as I said) are visible though they aren't prominent, he has spindly lower legs and arms and collar bones but a nice bum and a tiny bulge on his tummy (lost his toddler tummy about 6 months ago at 4.5)

My mother is convinced he is "skinny and say to me regularly how he is looking thin and "peaky ( is mixed asian with golden skin so not sure how he can look "peaky"!). In fatc at 107cm and 17.4kgs his is aorund 30% for his height and weight so perfectly normal and uses masses of energy and rarely gets sick (touch wood).

Her comments make more sense if you know that she is overweight as were all her children (including me) - I think she has no judgement of what looks normal. She gives him chocolate an hour before we're due to eat a cooked sunday lunch (a bowlful not a couple!) and if he ever says "no more thanks I've had enough" to any treats like choclate she tires to talk him inot having more . Its a real bugbear of mine.

I think you get so used to what your child looks like you no longer see then accurately and should pay attntion to the cold numbers carefully before dismissing them.

I really don't understand how on MN how terrible it is that chidlrne are overwieght is alwasy a hotly posted thread but when we start talking about individual children no-ones child is ever overweight. That doesn;t seem very likely - surely some of the children in the 80%+ percentiles must be overweight and some in teh 20%- must be underweight.

Think this might be worth a mention. As I have said my dc are built. DS was chubbiest at about 10. Between 11 and 13 he grew 9 inches and gained no more than about 4lb. He's now 5'10 and about 10st 5lb. DD was chunky too - is presently about 5'2" (11) and weighs 8st 5lb. I doubt she will ever be a size 10 but she is not obese - no tummy whatsoever but neither have I ever seen ribs or hip bones. Might add we are of Germanic/Anglo Saxon stock and both dp and I are broadly built but we are NOT FAT.

Anyway at 5 dd was really very ill - won't go into details but in two weeks she lost 13lb. I can't remember exactly what she weighed but it was well over 4st and tbh she was looking a bit chunky. That bit of extra weight kept her off an intravenous drip and the consultant told me that she would have been knocked back a lot further if she hadn't had a bit of spare to lose.

DD1 got measured today at her asthma check up. She is 4.9y/o 113cm and 20.2kg. She has a 56cm chest and a 50cm waist (22"/20") and has a 51cm inside leg.

Her grandma had to make her pinafores for school as if I ordered them by chest measurements 22"/56cm then they were St Trinian short if I ordered by length (she needed 6-7 for length) they were swimming on her.

DD2 is approx 100cm and approx 14kg (she has an aversion to being weighed/measured but will go on the Wii Fit) and is 2.11y/o. She is mainly in 3-4 clothes and has been since the weather got colder. She is yet to start playgroup but is already wearing some of the clothes DD1 wore in her last spring term of playgroup (so would have been just 4).

DD1 is 13m/o and is in 6-9m she is diddy!

I always take out spare clothes for the DDs in the change bag and I once put a pair of leggings on DD1 which were in DD2's pouch and they were 9-12 months (I'd not updated the clothes in a while )! They are clam diggers on DD1, cropped leggings on DD2 and full length+ on DD3 .

I think you get so used to what your child looks like you no longer see then accurately and should pay attntion to the cold numbers carefully before dismissing them.

I agree.

Also, I am happy to admit that my child is underweight. I know she is. But I struggle to see what I or she can do about it as that is just her natural body shape, I think. I'm underweight, too, and so is my husband. None of us restrict our food intake at all, apart from to make an effort to be healthy in our eating habits. And for DD at four, that only takes the form of encouraging her to eat fruit and veg and giving her brown bread rather than white. She gets plenty of high calorie foods like meat and cheese and cream and butter etc. She just stops eating when she isn't hungry any more and I think I would be doing her a disservice to encourage her to eat more than she seems to want. She does eat what seems to me a reasonable amount for a child a quarter of my weight, btw, probably portions that are around a third or so of what I would eat, which seems okay as she is growing and I am not. Actually, she weighs quite a bit more than I did at the same age. She is somewhere around the 0.2 percentile according to the NHS BMI thing. So she is underweight.

I make quite a few of her clothes, actually. At 12 kg, she weighs less than my friend's 16 month old by far.

DS is a one of the skinny ones. He is 5 in January and currently wearing a mixture of 18-24month, 2yr, and just started to go into 2-3 yr trousers. His school ones are Age 3 M+S, the smallest ones I could find,they are on the tighest elastic as they fell down the othe rweek going into class. I have noticed they are definitely starting to flap round his ankles. I'm going to make his next ones .

He has always been the tiniest child of his peers and I have always had comments but the gap now doesnt seem anywhere near as big

OR I was given a few pairs of M&S 3yr old trousers for DS2. I had trouble getting them past his thighs let alone round his waist.

Its awful for parents to be looked at as if their child is over/underweight. At the end of the day every child grows at different rates and sizes. Some grow bigger younger some later.

The NHS weight charts only tell you where you are in relation to the rest of the population. They don't tell you what weight is healthy. Therefore if over 50% of the population are overweight then you can be on the 50th percentile and still be overweight.

In some ways it would be better to do trousers by size (as mens' are done) rather than age - certainly ds1 has huge problems buying trousers, because anything that is long enough for him (and he's average to slightly above average height atm, but tends to be bang on average) is just stupidly big on the waist/hips. Adjustable waists help, but if you pull them in to the smallest setting, they do look silly, and at age 9 I think he'd like some that aren't all elasticky round the waist and pulled in ridiculously.

Perhaps the answer is to have a label like 'age 9, small waist', or even 'age 9, xxcm waist'. And have the adjustable waists as well, so that you have some hope of buying SOMETHING that doesn't a) fall down and b) look ridiculous.

m&S do school trousers with different lenghts for waist isze for length and Vertbaudet/La Redoute do different fits for childrens jeans