To be horrified the NHS classes 5yo DD as overweight?

[mommathatwearspink]

DD (5) had her school night and weight check at school earlier in the week. Received a letter today saying that she is on the 94th percentile and classes as overweight for her age and height.

Im horrified! She doesn’t look overweight, does gymnastics and swimming each week, doesn’t over eat, treats are limited and I cook healthy meals from scratch most days. What the hell am I doing wrong???

Ds1 age 8 is 27kg, he's really tall so actually works out 11th centile according to nhs bmi

Ds2 is 6 and 21kg and 53rd centile according to nhs bmi

This same thread is posted every time weight and height is checked and letters are sent out, it can't have come as a surprise that every time some children are classed as overweight.

It's obviously a mathematical calculated result, you can choose to ignore it but it probably does mean your children at that moment was over the recommended weight but it is only a snapshot

I didn't think they used bmi for prmercentiles.

Please don't refuse even if you're going to ignore the results. It's important to be able to have trends.

Sorry

I don't think they use bmi for children.

Haven’t RTFT but OP and to the person who said her 5 yr old was 5 stone- in the kindest possible way no one on here can tell you if your child is overweight.

They may be, they may not be, but I do think we have become conditioned to seeing bigger children and so it becomes the norm. Doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

My DS is 6 and three quarters years old, and weighs 3 st 5lb. To look at him, he looks skinny/slim. You can see all his ribs both front and back and he has no visible fat. Most people would definitely say he was a slim child. However, put his height and weight into the NHS BMI calculator and he is bang on 50th percentile and in the middle of the healthy weight. So he’s not actually skinny, or even that slim. Just normal! Which is a case in point.

DD is 10 and a bit. She’s definitely not slim but does a LOT of sport and doesn’t look overweight to most people. NHS bmi has her at 86th percentile so just within healthy weight range. I keep a close eye on it (tactfully!) as I don’t want her slipping up to the overweight range.

She is a classic example of you can’t out train eating what you want. When I say she does a lot of sport I mean high level intense 25 plus hours a week. She likes her food and snacks etc and so I am keeping an eye she’s not going OTT.

@Chouetted 7 stone at age 13 is massive unless they're tall! 13 stone is insane.

The 5 stone child is nearly 5 so actually 4 years old. My children aren't the slimmest but were 5 stone at age 10ish.

I think that they should give parents the height and weight percentiles. Kids with tall parents (day a basketball player and model) are more likely to be taller than their peers and shouldn't be made to feel bad about their height being on a high percentile.

What is interesting in these sort of posts is when parents point out that their kids do PE and a couple of clubs every week. PE lessons are rarely that taxing ime and kids who skip, play footie or running games like Tag at playtime will be burning far more calories than primary school PE.

Swimming doesn't use that many calories unless you are swimming laps at full strength for a long time, without going to the vending machines afterwards. Most kids lessons aren't like that. They spend most of their (very short) lessons sitting waitihg for their turn. I know, because I swim at the same time.
Children really need to be active through most of their day, walking, playing during during break, skipping, playing football, british bulldog etc, and only eating 3-4 small meals a day purely to fuel them up, with the occasional small bar of chocolate or bag of sweets as a treat.

my 12 yo is 7 stone, but they are 5f9... very bottom of healthy weight.

13yo can be anything from 5 foot to 6 foot +

My dd was 5 foot 7 at 13 and weighed 7stone. She's a size 6 in women's clothes.

I don't agree with people who say all normal children should look thin and you can see their ribs! DS 1 and 2 are tall and skinny.
DD is 17, she is really solid and yes probably slightly overweight because she loves to eat 😊 However she has always been solid, from being a baby, and she is the most active of the 3, plays a lot of sport at a decent level and is physically fit.
We are not all the same build. She is only 5 foot and hasn't grown since she was 11.

5 stone at nearly 5! @ToffeePennie,

My 10 year old doesn’t even weigh that! Unless they are ridiculously tall for their age then they are overweight.

It’s hard for some people to realise as lots of children are overweight and it’s hard to compare.

DS 9 is classed as morbidity obese... on the 96th percentile l

He is in age 15/16 clothes and 5ft 2 and 8 stone 2 and a size 9 shoe.

He has muscle after muscle (he does, goal keeping x3, ice hockey x1 mixed martial arts x2 and tennis) every week.

He also does after school club 5x a week from football, dodgeball, athletics and basketball)

DS is under a consultant for his anaphylactic allergies and asthma... he told me to throw it in the bin

bruffin didn’t know that. What’s interesting about that is as we all agree that we are all gradually becoming bigger societally (most anyway) if A BMI centile were done in the 60, say, and now, and a child were at 87th centile at both, the child now would be significantly more overweight. By using a comparative base line rather than an objective baseline we are surely accepting increase in body weight as the norm??? (May have misunderstood this).

in the 1970s when I was 9 I weighed 5 stone. I remember it clearly because I looked overweight and felt overweight compared to all the other girls.
Looking at photos I did look chubbier than the others but would not stand out in a class of 9 year olds today.

In the 1960s I meant, and now.

HaudYerWheeshtYaWeeBellend

Your 9’year old wearing age 15/16 clothes, doesn’t that tell you something? How much do you have to take the trousers up?

Overweight in children isn’t just weight - excess calories intake can lead to them growing taller earlier, so being excessively tall for their age doesn’t mean a corresponding high weight isn’t a problem.

And yes, the variation in build between individuals is already accounted for by the “range” brackets of BMIs. For adults, a BMI is 20 and of 24 are both in “healthy”. So the petite person and the broad-framed person aren’t expected to be a single identical weight.

Yet our school by year 6 is full of overweight kids, boys with rolls of fat, girls with no waist at all. Who dont have any discernable ribs. I bet half of their parents through away the letter and claimed it was puppy fat.

@havelockinari Why is 13 stone insane? It's a reasonable weight for a tall, highly active adult, and thirteen is a reasonable age to hit adult height for a girl. Not all girls will, in fact most won't but it's not unusual.

13 stone is quite overweight for most women. In fact it would count as overweight for any female under 6ft tall. (Obviously excluding the athletes etc etc that are always brought up in these threads).

Teenagers are at peak fitness I don't think this is true nowadays, sadly. I think it's probably quite easy to do very little in PE if you don't want to.
I think it's time to start thinking about proper compulsory exercise for all schoolchildren, say an hour a day. It would be far more useful than compulsory religious assemblies which only a tiny minority adhere to.

I have just looked and a woman who is 5ft 10 is classed as overweight at 13 stone and at 6 foot 13 stone is only just a healthy weight (bmi of 24.1)

How tall were you at 13?

Chouetted leave off, no 13 year old girl should weigh 13 stone.

WW2 and 1950s rationing actually helped the poorer children as they had more food and consequently grew taller; the same can be seen in Japanese-Americans and their cousins in Japan.

The population is growing taller as well as heavier. My mother had a permanent chip on her shoulder at growing up tall with big feet in the 1920s and 1930s. 5'7"and size 7 feet in a woman is hardly out of the ordinary now. Likewise, 6' in her man like my father (born 1920) is normal whereas his father at 5'4“ would be unusually small but not in the late 19th century working class.

Me, I'm like my mother and her mother, big boned, wide-shouldered and hipped, narrow-waisted, strong thighs and suiting Edwardian costume perfectly. I would be well suited to being out in the fields tattie howkin.