to think these children ARE overweight?

[OkMaybeNot]

The schools in my area have just sent out the results of the National Child Measurement Programme.

There are a number of acquaintances/friends on my social media who have posted their child's result online, along with a picture of their child and an angry rant about how their child is as skinny as a rake, not an ounce of fat on them, 'stocky' not 'fat', perfectly healthy etc etc.

But they are. Some of them are very overweight and plainly so. Others may be a little bit chubby and due for a growth spurt or something, but clearly not slim, either.

There are streams of comments underneath these posts agreeing and expressing their disgust and anger. And I'm wondering if everyone's lying, or they genuinely believe that these children are slim?

I know BMI is notoriously squiffy when it comes to kids, and I have seen genuine cases of it being so totally wrong it's laughable, especially when it comes to strong, athletic children. But that isn't the case for these children, at all.

AIBU to think that you owe it to your child to at least consider the results before going on the defensive?

Completely agree Thesearepearls, we have normalised being fat.
Processed foods and drink are largely to blame, they contain so much fat and sugar.
We didn’t have the same amount of processed foods when we were children and I can’t remember anyone at school in the 70s being fat.

Everyone i know in the 70sand 80s lived on processed shit! Findus crispy pancakes, tinned meat, sachets of angel delight, microwave meals etc. Lunch was a white bread cheap ham/paste sandwich, a wagon wheel and a packet of crisps. Sugary cereal for breakfast. Fish fingers or tinned soup for dinner.

Kids i know now have such a better choice of diet.

I was discussing that at work today. I used to have coco pops for breakfast, white bread sandwich, packet of crisps and a twirl for lunch and then dinner would be something from the freezer. I've always been a healthy weight (not as easy now I'm older). I just assume it's because those three meals were all I ate, obviously seriously lacking in nutritional value but calorie wise I wasn't over eating?

I know what you mean. I had cereal heaped with sugar for breakfast, packed lunch was cheap fish paste filling on white bread, a Club bar, bag of crisps, bottle of cherryade and possibly an apple. Potato waffles, Findus crispy pancakes and tinned spaghetti for tea. Drinks were squash and milky tea.

It can only be lack of snacks and portion size that meant that I would have been considered 'healthy'.

Angel Delight was considered 'healthy' as it had milk in, if I remember correctly.

Snacks are fine. My DC love bananas. You just don't need to load them with crap.

I'm going to be honest here but it makes me feel funny when I see overweight children. I was a bit chubby from 9-14 ish and hated it. Not sure if that's why but it effects me far too much when I see fat kids. I think it's gross (really sorry but just being honest) and I just feel instantly annoyed at their parents.

It seems to un natural! They ( in my mind) should be skinny, active and care free. It explodes my mind seeing them which big bellies or cellulite or even worse tugging at clothing trying to hide their bodies. This over reaction must come from my own painful memories of being over weight.

I grew up in the 70s- it was cereal and toast, scrambled eggs or porridge for breakfast. School dinners had a pudding every day, although it was combined with a healthy main course and veg every day. Tea was mostly meat and two veg type meals cooked from scratch- pretty healthy- but again we always had dessert. We also could watch TV without a big bowl of crisps.

Sometimes it's the way you eat that makes the difference. Someone earlier mentioned white potatoes being worse than sugar. The difference is, potatoes are usually eaten with a meal, so combined with protein which changes the way your body processes them- so nothing wrong with eating a normal portion of potatoes with your meal. Same with puddings- a small dessert as part of a meal isn't going to make you fat, or raise our blood sugar levels too much.

I'm really stunned that people think posting pics/results is a good idea. It's an invasion of privacy and the type of comments that it will provoke is just going to compound that feeling that fat = wrong. I know there are related health issues with being overweight. But this behaving like the suggestion that someone is fat is some terrible slur - this isn't helping anyone.

okmaybenot totally agree. I was a sugar hound as a kid (like most kids) yet was still rail-thin as were my siblings and friends. And I grew up in mid to late 90s. We played all day outside. We weren't cooped up by our helicopter parents , with a phone, iPad, 3ds, wiiU, etc glued like an appendage while we sat entranced on the couch after sitting alllll day at school.
I have a 10 year old and it saddens me that he can't have the childhood of going out and playing with his friends in the woods or parks because there are no kids outside within sight.

I was a skinny child until I was 10 when I started to put on weight. I was weighed in the school office with several people, including my Mum, present and learned I was overweight. At school dinners the supervising teacher would often comment on what I was eating informing the whole dining hall that I was on a diet so I started going home for lunch and making my own as mum was at work. The school secretary would appear at break to ask what I had for my playpiece so I started eating it in the toilet. Over 40 years later I can still feel the flush of shame and so began my years of disordered eating. The sad thing is that, looking back at photos, I was not really that big. Fat shaming is not the answer.

The problem chubby kids, usually equals chubby parents, and the parents don't want to admit they are doing anything wrong!!!

I hate to blame schools, because they get blamed for enough, but

Our school gives quite conflicting signals.

Emphasis on healthy school dinners, no packed lunches full of junk, fruit snack time. Everytime a kids has a birthday the kids come home from school with sweets, at Christmas they get those sweet comes from the teacher, the TA,the class dinner lady. Same at Easter. It's lovely they care, but I don't remember all these sweets in the 80s.

And Halloween, trick or treating round the block and each house giving out a sweet cone not just a couple of sweets. My kids come home with pounds of sweets.

And I'm not sure this sugary display of affection actually makes my children any happier.

I think a lot of children pre 1980 just accepted being hungry and uncomfortable as the norm because complaining was dealt with in a very different way

I never felt uncomfortable or was aware of being hungry until just before my meal.
I think many children now have got into the habit of asking for snacks because they've always been given them. Complaining gets them what they want...instant gratification, never having to wait.
I've also noticed, especially on MN that lots of mothers worry too much that their child is hungry if they don't eat whenever they want. A child won't be in any sort of agony being made to wait until their meal!

I doubt many children actually know what real hunger feels like. They only have to say ' I'm starving!' and a mum will feel bad if she doesn't feed them immediately. It's ridiculous...and is one of the reasons obesity has risen.

We have normalised being fat to the degree that people don't even notice it properly any more. When I was in primary there was one girl in the class who was a little too big. Her mother was proactive about it before it got worse. Now, a lot of primary school children I see are fat. One in particular I see about is wider than she is tall and is met after school by her equally obese mother and given a family size pack of jelly sweets for a snack. The poor girl. But if being fat is a new normal, surely that should lessen the old stigma about saying it. Nearly like telling a parent that their child needs glasses or something. It needs to get its weight on track. But some parents just ignore it through precious defensiveness and set their child up to have life long weight problems 😡

Agree with various other PP that it’s become normalized. DD (10) is average height and yet wears M&S uniform age 7-8 with elastics on waists on the tightest button. She’s slim, yes, but not skinny.

I really fucking hate the sound of all the sweets at school. Mine are too little for school yet, but I imagine I’ll be That Mum, writing letters to ban sweets from school...

DD occasionally comes home with sweet stuff from nursery, but it isn’t that much. It would annoy me if it was a daily occurrence.

Mine are both on the opposite side of the scale on those school national scales. Both times referred to paediatric assessment.

Consultants took one look at them running in the corridor and laughing/playing. Noted on records healthy.

Laughable really.

Dd1 at high school, she describes the canteen food as ‘pure greese’, there’s only one healthy option which is usually not very nice, they serve pizza, garlic bread, cakes, biscuits and chips. They have stopped selling fizzy drinks and the chips are only available on a Friday but there are not many healthy options.

trumpetoftheswan I remember my mum and her friends looking down on one neighbour for serving her children Angel Delight as they considered it junk food as it came in a packet and had to be reconstituted.

I went over there all the time as I loved it!

Meditrina, I’m sure there were earlier studies of children’s height/weight ratio, but I am referring to one that was carried out around 2007, it may have been local rather than national, however the point I was making was that if such surveys are not compulsory for all Y6 children to take part in then the results will be distorted by allowing parents to exclude those children who are overweight.

Coming to this late.

My DDs school has really bad food. They used to have much more sugar laden days when we where in Latin America. Every birthday, pulse Easter, Halloween and Christmas. In a class of 25 odd that’s a lot of fecking cake/sweats/fizzy drink. But they did 6 hours of PE a week plus team practice after school midweek and a match on Saturdays.

DD1 gained over a stone when we moved back here.

Wow, you guys are lucky! Your country actually measures the weight of your children and informs the parents that their children are overweight. What a great thing. I'm from America and if you could see the kids from the deep South of the country (the states of Alabama and Mississippi especially) your kids would look like supermodels! 11yo with type 2 diabetes is a norm all across the South. I think if The U.S.had an official entity warning the obese parents that their kids are OFFICIALLY obese and the dangers it could make a huge difference.

What is a stone? How many pounds? Or grams or whatever. LoL

Bashun a stone is 14 pounds.