DD weighed without my consent, I think

[geisha]

And should I do anything about it?

When Dd2 started school in September, we were given a consent form to sign for the routine assessment that all reception children can have which ultimately generates a letter to tell you whether your child is normal or below or above average weight. We did not want DD2 to undergo this assessment due to our past experience with DD1 and circled the appropriate section of the form and signed it. However, I have today found out that she has been weighed and her height measured. On the one hand there has been no harm done, but on the other hand we witheld our consent and she has undergone this assessment against our wishes. Could therre be any other reason to weigh her and WWYD?

I agree with Tatty, our job not the schools.

It doesn't really matter what the issue is or your reasons for not giving consent. The point it you said no and they did it anyway.

YANBU and I would be having strong words with the school. Like others have said, if you didn't given consent for other things like photos published or vaccinations, would they just ignore that too?

Get over it they weighed her not sold her to a pedophile ring

YANBU. I opposed this too at the y6 end of primary. For the following reasons:

DD had developed rapidly and started her periods. Height and weight at 11 meant she was obese - putting in same height and weight at 13 came up with a result within the normal range. Her development was beyond her years and I did not want it noted on her medical records that at 11 she was obese.

At 5 I would say that any issues should have been picked up by the HV service and dealt with at GP level. IMO this practice of weighing and measuring comprises a pc job creation scheme that the country can ill afford.

Are you sure she has actually been weighed and measured not just seen all her friends being done ?
If so I would go ape shit at the school, will they be vaccinated behind your back too ? They've completely over stepped the mark IMO.
Not sure what you can do though because you can't un-measure her, but you can make sure the results are never seen one or the other by your DD.

i refused consent too, so I will wait and see what happens

I also refused permission for pictures of dd to be put on internet (maybe oversensitive but i was subject to having my photo copied from my secondary school website and used in what would be classed as a cyber bullying campaign now}

Turns out that local paper went in and took class shot with dd in published it in paper and put it up on internet for parents to buy

Runaway its not about the fact that they weighed her. The parents withheld consent and the school did it anyway. Far more worrying.

Maryz seeing that confirms that I too wouldn't given consent for DS to be weighed at school. He is tall for his age and is quite heavy but he is no where near fat and I wouldn't want him labelled as such because of some stupid school chart that is totally unnecessary.

YANBU. I would find out who's doing the weighing - usually the local Primary Care Trust - and talk to their PALS service.
A similar thing happened to my DDs with a school dental check. We see our dentist every 6 months so I did not consent - they were checked anyway, and DD2 came home with a letter saying that a problem had been identified and we should see a dentist. Which we'd done just 6 weeks ago. There was no info as to the nature of the problem on the letter, so I suspected it was the loose tooth we already knew about - both my DDs started losing baby teeth very early, this is normal in our family.
So I complained to PALS about the unhelpfulness of the letter and about the breach of consent rules, and the PCT put them on a no consent list.
Consent is at the bedrock of medical practice - I work in health research and if any of our staff failed to properly consent a patient, they would lose their jobs.

Maryz that is unbelievable, I would be so livid.

I was about to say that I think it is essential for the school to do this to ensure that less children 'slip the net', but it should be done as a totally anonylmous thing with only the parents and health workers knowing the outcome.

A chart is disgusting.

What Mary said about her DD (and others) - I have heard of happening a lot... including one little girl who is very fit and has a lovely body shape - not at all fat, being teased for being 'fat' due to the BMI calculations the did - she's quite muscular due to her gymnastics - but there's more fat on a tic tac than this kid... it didn't stop the others calling her names...

That aside - the real issue here is that you signed a form - they decided to ignore it. That is not good enough and yes, I'd be having words - it could have just as easily been something that would have harmed her.

YANBU.

I got weighed by the school nurse age 12. I was told I was overweight and not to eat so many chips. I never ate chips - in actual fact I swam competitively and trained four evenings a week for between 60-90 minutes.

I will never consent for a child of mine to be weighed, not even by a medical professional unless it is for good reason (GA etc) rather than routine.

If you were given the option to withold consent then your wishes should have been upheld.

I don't necessarily agree with your decision on this occasion but YANBU to be annoyed when having told the school you didn't want something done they carried on regardless.

YANBU. It is important that you know in future that the school will acknowledge and adhere to consent forms - whatever they may be for.

YANBU

They have absolutely no right to go against your wishes, what next, Giving your child an injection without your consent. medicine without parental consent, photographing them.

fwiw I refused to allow dd to be weighed in y6.

She is very fit, dance classes 5 times per week, can do splits swim etc etc. the reason i refused was this:
I have issues regarding my weight ( I am a size 10 but know I will get back down to a size 8 asap)and had issues with food as a child.
MY dd is very tall for her age and although fit and not fat is not small and skinny like most of her friends were at the time. Therefore I did not want anyone saying things along the lines of oh I am 6lbs lighter than you.

I don't expect anyone to understand but i am at present unable to weigh myself simply because i feel far to "heavy" and i am trying not to let my dd go through the same as I do.

Ye gods, what a shitty thing for the school to do!

Although to be fair, most schools tend to turn a blind eye to what the parents or even the child's wishes are when it comes to anything health-related.
When I was 13, everyone was meant to get the TB vaccine. I was scared shitless a wimp and as my mum didn't see a need for it she refused permission for me to get it, and kept me off school that day so they couldn't force me. (And I was actually making myself sick with fear.)

Roll on about a year, and I'm dragged out of English (me dreading that I'm in some sort of trouble!), marched down to the hall and practically held down to have the jab stuck in me with hundreds of year nines looking on

I imagine if they'd had these new-fangled weighing things in place then, they would have forced me to do that, too.
TBH it does nothing for younger children except give bullies more ammunition against taller/more muscular kids.
YANBU, OP, complain to the school. It's nonsense!

I envisaged the weighing process as the children going off one by one into a private room, being measured, and then the results would be sent home in a letter and nothing else - that I'd have no problem with. But discussing the results as a class is nasty.

TBH I can weigh mine at home so I'd know if they were overweight. DS was nearly 12lbs at birth and so is likely to stay big for a while, though at 15m he has dropped to the 75th centile.

I would leave it.

saying that, I also did NOT give consent for my DC to be weighed.

I do not want government officials to weigh and assess my children, and then get stupid letters about it. Neither do I want Gvt Officials to come into my house to see what I feed the children (not that they do this, but to me it is part of the government overstepping the mark and interfering with something that is parental responsibility)

My DC are not overweight, I just do not support the NHS wasting funds like this.

It is on par with lunchbox contents being checked, as happens in some schools, and makes me feel like we live in BB land.

I am wary and suspicious of box tickers, is all.

I've witheld consent for my child too. He's very skinny, 25th centile for 50th height, and I simply fail to see what business it is of anyone else what he weighs. And I do not trust the PCT to interpret any results properly within the framework of his whole environment and circumstances. Oh that's right, they can't - all they see is a single 5 second snapshot of what he weighs at that moment in time. So what's the point again?

I will be furious if he is weighed given this, the principle of informed consent really is key, and anyone on this thread glossing over that, or who honestly doesn't realise it needs to seriously educate themselves.

YANBU on the grounds you refused consent.

I think your being fair to admit in this case no harm done but right to say that it could be worse in the future.

With regards to weight, 3 months after I had DS I got viral hepititis and obviously was still a little over weight (4kg). The nurses answer 'stop drinking, eating rubbish and you'll be fine' [anger]. This upset me at 24 yo so can't imagine how a 4/5 yo would feel.

Let us know what the school says.

One of the main reasons I will be refusing is that they do it at 11 or whenever it is they leave primary school as well as when they start. I dont think its going to make a massive difference at 5 ish years old but at 11, it really could depending how its done (whether they are big or small) and I just dont trust them to do it sensitively.

There was a girl in my class at 12 years old. We got weighed and measured, she was on the slighter side of average and she sort of got "praised" for being perfect by the school nurse. It triggered something in her - the validation - over that summer she became anorexic and when term started the following year she didn't come back for a while.

She wrote us a letter saying she had been in hospital with anorexia but was hoping to return soon.

She did eventually return looking okay but she said that it started when she got weighed and she liked being told she was perfect and wanted to be "more and more perfect" and loved getting on the scales and seeing the numbers going down further towards the "ultimate perfect". She'd never really noticed scales before that day.

So its not just a case of "protect the fat kids from potential humiliation" which makes me think that being weighed in a group in what could seem like a competitive situation could be at worst, damaging and at best, unnecessary when most homes have a set of scales and failing that, parents and GP's have a set of eyes which they can follow up with some scales if necessary.

The ones who "slip through the net" may well do so anyway - parents who are not willing to accept their child is obese probably wont anyway - they will say BMI is rubbish, the child has big bones, they are built that way, and wont be "told" by a letter anyway.

I just dont trust them to get it right, and feel its my job, not theirs, and if only to protest that point then its worth refusing consent for me. They can only overstep the mark if you let them.

I was talking to the nurse weighing our Year 6 last year and she said that in the last area she worked in they always weighed and measured the whole class so that no-one knew whose parents had refused consent, they simply didn't record the data for those with no consent.
And often the schools don't even compile the lists themselves, they simply give the collected forms to the nurses together with class lists, so it may not actually be the school's mistake at all.

In any case, the school don't even see the data, it certainly is not discussed in class - that incident would have been the result of a misguided maths or ICT lesson on data handling - the data handling program we use has a example database of information about children which includes height and weight-we always edit out those fields.

So RustyBear, does the nurse not feel any shame in deliberately flouting the wishes of those parents who refused persmission? Because I refuse permission for my child to be weighed at all, not just for the data to be recorded. It's shameful, frankly.

When we had the letters out you had to telephone the relevant bod at the Local Authority to get your child removed from the weighing. I did this.

Are you sure you didn't have to call?

A lot of people (ie, teachers that I know personally) argue that this is how you find the children who are being abused. I would wonder what is going on at school that a teacher does not notice that a child is so underweight that they are not being fed until they are weighed? Do we need to weigh a child to know that they are very obese?

DS is very shy and hates strange people touching him, this is why I refused.

I don't know, sparkle, because we don't do it that way in our school, I was just passing on what she said to me.

At our school it's done in the morning when the children are in different sets for Maths or Literacy, so it would be difficult for any of the children to notice who hasn't been called.

But 10 year old children (boys as well as girls) can be very bitchy and make remarks such as "You're not getting weighed because you'd break the scales"

I refused consent as well but only because the teacher stuck a form in front of me and said sign this - i asked what it was - exactly what tests they were doing (it didnt say on the form) - she couldnt tell me - told me it was nothing to worry about.

I refused on the basis i wanted to know exactly what i was consenting to.

Few weeks later i get letter telling me that he had had his eyes tested and there was a problem - i was furious because they had completely ignored my instruction - the opticians werent happy either and were full if apology and i complained to the snotty school secretary .

We then had letter home telling me he was underweight (like i didnt know that

But there was nothing wrong with him, (his eyes were fine) and it just caused more worry for no reason and they did not have permission - it doesnt matter what anyone thinks about your decision to refuse - its your decision not the schools