"You're a big heavy girl"

[0utForAWalkBitch]

My mum says this to my two year old all the time when lifting her. I absolutely know it's not meant maliciously, but I remember her saying the same thing to me as a child and developing a terrible complex about my weight as a result (other factors probably at play with me though, my dad was very vocal about weight, whereas me and my husband never mention it). She only sees my mum every few months due to distance but has started talking about being a "heavy girl" to me when I lift her, even when my mum isn't there.

AIBU to ask my mum not to say this? I don't want to make a big deal of it if I'm projecting my own emotions a bit too much maybe. What do you think? I think mentioning it will upset my mum which I don't want to do, but likewise I don't want my daughter growing up being told she's heavy when she is not!

Please stop her saying it OP. It's not necessary - there's a difference between saying to a child "golly, you've grown again" to "gosh you're a big heavy girl"

I have an ED - non typical - but this stems back to childhood experience.

i wouldn't ever call anyone heavy, even if it's supposed to be reinvented as good - just not necessary, why can't your mum say something else? I'm a big tall (never in fact overweight) eating disordered person who's mum used to call her miss piggy in a 'fun affectionate' way every-time I was enjoying food. She started saying it to DD and I told her to stop and that's it, she doesn't say it anymore.

I take off my hat to the kid who wants to be heavier so she can go faster on the slides!!! That's brilliant.

kids have to recognise that their time for being picked up and swung around is limited, simply because they grow and will therefore be bigger and heavier.

How about if, next time your mother says it, you counter with "yes, you're a growing girl and grandma is getting weaker as she gets older so finds it hard to lift you now"

I admit to telling DS2 "Gosh you're heavy" sometimes when I pick him up, usually out of the bath, because he is heavy and I have a bad back. I say it so that he knows it's a time to walk to the bedroom to get dressed, rather than me carrying him (although he'll still ask sometimes). I'll be very surprised if he takes it to heart at any point, but will make sure I don't do it too often or in any kind of pejorative way, just to be on the safe side.

grandma is getting weaker as she gets older so finds it hard to lift you now

See, now, that would be rude. Describing someone as "weak" is rude. Describing a child as "heavy", while being tedious small talk, is not rude.

I'm sure even a "strong" person would struggle to hold a child for a long period of time, most kids ain't light.

*Describing a child in the context of lifting, I should clarify.

WTF has the world come to if an adult can't tell a 2 year old they heavy when they lift them up?
This is a ridiculous post- sorry OP.

I wasn't allowed by my consultant to lift anything over 1 stone (14 pounds) after a gynae repair.

My DD was 2 at the time so I spent several years telling her she was too heavy for me to lift her. she's now a super-fit gym bunny, who eats like a horse and is a healthy, lovely 27 year old, size 10, who has no eating or weight issues whatsoever.

don't attribute adult hang-ups to a 2 yr old baby.

No wonder there are so many issues about if people are constantly making them.

She needs to stop saying that.
I'm tall and strong, and in my small primary school I was the tallest in a class of twelve. I remember at the age of about five being desperately upset in advance of the teacher making a height and weight chart for the wall and knowing that I would be at the top of both. My mother asked me if I thought the obese boy in the class might be heavier than me and I wept that I was sure he wouldn't be. He wasn't, and I recall that broad red bar on the weight chart that was stuck on the fucking wall all year long as if it was yesterday.
I remember a Special K ad which ran "If you can pinch more than an inch" and my (lovely) dad pinching my waist to my unspoken distress. I remember sitting on my cousin's knee and trying to support my own weight on my toes and the arm of the chair so she wouldn't think I was too heavy.
I went on to have a distressed relationship with food in my teens.
I was actually never fat.

o/p, I agree with you. Tell her not to say it.

I was always referred to as "big" and "heavy", when I was perfectly normal sized. Guess what, I have always seen myself as big and heavy.

The phrase 'heavy reinvented as good' is a projection of your own issues. Heavy was never bad, it's a neutral, factual term. Heavy is not the same as overweight. If you feel it's bad, those are your very real feelings but not an external truth that others will necessarily perceive. We're not all starting from the same negative place as you.

Miss Piggy is not nice though - greedy / piggy is a perjorative term, quite different from hungry, or having a good appetite.

broodmare why were you so upset about being at the top of the charts? These feelings don't develop in a vacuum. None of the things you've described would definitely be rude or upsetting to a child, so there must be a reason why you were more prone to being upset about than some of the other posters here.

What was the point of the chart anyway? Was it to shame "fat / tall" children or something more innocent like showing how everyone is different?

What you describe it totally different Villainous- you were being singled out in front of your peers and your dad was teasing you, when you are a pre-teen.

Since time began, I am sure that elderly grans have been telling their grandchildren they are heavy when they lift them up.

Did this ever result in an eating disorder or a child who had issues later on? I very much doubt it. I can't believe the number of posters saying the gran should stop.

YABVU OP.

Exactly Polly, it's bloody madness.

Oh, we would only have been learning about cm and kg. Nice teacher, no fat-shaming.

I was an extremely early and fluent reader and I recall browsing magazines in my grandmother's house and becoming aware of looks and diets and so on. Now in a different era of media I think no child needs to read early to become unnecessarily conscious of weight.

It's so easy to just not say it, why would you?

My kids and their friends were weighing themselves to find out who who was heaviest at a recent sleepover. Because they were preteen boys, being heaviest was a good thing, correlated with being biggest and strongest (there was an argument about whether it made you fastest, which then had to be settled by a race).

I know it is different for girls but it shouldn't be. And the reason it is different is that they are told from a young age that being big and strong (or getting heavier, or being too tall) is bad and undesirable for girls. It's a tragedy but I can't help thinking we are perpetuating it by our reaction to certain words and phrases.

OP I get where you are coming from (being female) but really, I do think that you/we shouldn't feel like that and pass these insecurities on.

I think it's all about how you react. In my view, the reason it affected you so much was because of the context, but if you show you daughter that it's nothing to be ashamed or feel bad about, she'll have a better chance of not taking away the emotional aspect.

At least heavy means healthy, and it usually means happy too!

brood that's a relief, some teachers can be cruel, glad it wasn't one in this case.

Yes, it's easy to say it, but if we have to think about every little word that comes out of our mouths, and we start turning on each other for using fairly innocent phrases just in case they upset someone - well, we'd be turning into a Webster's Police State.

I was skinny as a rake as a child. Everyone from doctors to bullies used my weight against me. I was never really aware of fat or thin people, and it wasn't until I was a teenager that I started to feel self conscious about my figure. It wasn't someone picking me up and describing me as "light" that upset me, it was being called skinny, being compared to broomsticks, being asked if I ever ate, being force-fed by my mother because I "wasn't eating enough", being interrogated by doctors to see if I had anorexia.

If people are constantly calling you fat, that's one thing. OP's post, though, is another zone completely.

I wouldn't automatically think heavy is offensive but given it upset you as a child I think it is reasonable to ask her saying it.

• easy to NOT say it, sorry

Some of my in-laws do this to my children - and my parents 'nearly' do it but know not to. I hate it. My sister and DP have had issues with their weight - it's definitely part of it.

It's ridiculous. Winds me up!

They're not heavy at all! As someone above said, it's the lack of strength of the lifter not the excessive mass of the liftee.

Some children might be unfazed by it. Some might absorb it and carry it forward with them - with potentially devastating results.

Tell her it bothered you, and affected you, and that you don't want to risk the same happening to her.

• I mean tell your mum. Don't mention it at all to dd.

True for you, Darthvader, I'd be entirely anti-nanny-state-culture. However, of all comments that could be made, I think it's a potentially sensitive one. it's already slightly upsetting OP and if it's something the granny always says when she lifts the child at the not-negatively-weight-conscious age of two, it's to be expected that she'll still be saying it when she's older, and more aware.

I think "heavy" is an Americanism for "Fat" though. So maybe something to be aware of.

Why would she'd be saying it when she's older? She's not likely to still be picking her up at age 8, 12, or 16, is she?