To ask what you think of weighing children in school

[cadburyegg]

Discussion on our school groups about the possibility of weighing children restarting as it was halted in March 2020. Lots of parents think it’s shameful and unnecessary, some are of the opinion that it’s “just for statistics” and can also be useful to see what centile your child is at.

I’m on the fence tbh. What are your thoughts?

@goose1964

I'm going to put a different aspect, not ever child who's overweight is fat. I have 2 grandsons with 3 months difference , they're both tall and the same build but they have totally different weights. One has longer legs than the other , the one with long legs weighs a lot less than the other.

But it's height to weight ratio so the child wouldn't be overweight then would they?

@lazylinguist the sample size of 16 is normal for this kind of in-depth study. The researchers were trying to find out in detail how parents reacted, and how their reaction changed over time. I've pasted the whole summary conclusion here so people can see it without having to go to the page.

bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-016-3481-3
Conclusion
Whilst overweight and obesity is often portrayed as a medical condition, parents/guardians see it as deeply rooted in their social lives and not in health terms. Parents believe that the causes of overeating and lack of exercise relate closely to the obesogenic environment, particularly the complex social and cultural milieu and time pressures within which this sample of people live. Associating this problem in feedback letters with dangerous diseases like cancer, and advising parents to visit GPs to resolve child weight issues was perceived as inappropriate by the parents, and caused controversy and anger. Given the likelihood that the NCMP will continue as a monitoring device, it is evident that the management of the process needs to be reviewed, with particular attention being paid to the feedback process. Local health authorities will need to manage parental expectations and ensure linkage with appropriately commissioned remedial weight management interventions.

@goose1964

I'm going to put a different aspect, not ever child who's overweight is fat. I have 2 grandsons with 3 months difference , they're both tall and the same build but they have totally different weights. One has longer legs than the other , the one with long legs weighs a lot less than the other.

If one has much longer legs they're not the same build are they? One of them is carrying much more upper body weight.

I'd be happy to have my DC weighed at school, no issues with it

We use the scales at home so they are used to it

Surely… you look at your child at know?!
I look at my children and see they are extremely skinny, and very much so compared to peers
Add in all the sport they do

Hence I make sure lots of full fat and high calorie food

If they were podgy, I would adjust diet.

My two have never been on a scale

No need. I have eyes.

@goose1964

I'm going to put a different aspect, not ever child who's overweight is fat. I have 2 grandsons with 3 months difference , they're both tall and the same build but they have totally different weights. One has longer legs than the other , the one with long legs weighs a lot less than the other.

Not a different slant A slant that doesn’t make sense

Longer legs = different build

And “totally different” weights
And yet neither overweight

So one is very underweight OR one at bottom or normal and one at top of normal range because that’s peculiar otherwise

How old are they?

@Scaredycatmoo76

No it isn't obvious to everyone, especially when a child is just a little under or over weight. Often children will come from a family where everyone tends to be large/small so it's normalised. I was very skinny as a child and my eldest has a bigger build, before I weighed him I worried he was chubby - actually his weight is exactly in the middle of the healthy BMI.

Every a paediatrician sees they do height, weight, head circumference, blood pressure, pulse, cardiovascular exam.

No one seems to opt out of anything else. It's just in amongst other tests of health. It's also the easiest thing to change. I've never managed to grow a kid taller or shrink one. I've never made a head circumference smaller or changed a heart anomaly without surgery but I can change my child weight.

Parents very rarely think their own child is big. Kids often don't look as fat in clothes and by 10/11 parents don't see them without clothes anywhere near as much.

Also in poorer communities where there is more obesity being "stocky" is often valued characteristic so less likely to be seen as problematic. E.g. you hear "he's big built like his dad"or a solid little chap. Whereas slim children as seen as skinny / need feeding up.

Kids past toddler hood shouldn't have bellies but I often see 7/8/9 year olds with tummy's pressed against their t shirt & you just know those parents don't see their child as far.

It's abuse to make your child fat either willfully or through lack of education and nutritional understanding. You shouldn't be able to opt-out of being told the truth if you are harming your child.

I think it's particularly important to get an idea of what has happened post-Covid; whilst some slimmer children visibly lost weight over lockdown, others were significantly larger on their return to school (yes, usually the kids from poorer families - the ones who were least likely to have access to gardens or wide selections of healthier foods due to the lack of time or money on the part of their parents to be able to get supermarket deliveries, needing to work outside the home, etc).

The physical condition of both was also noticeable; those with parents likely to have time and/or the equipment to go out for daily exercise retained a lot of their core strength and physical fitness, those who didn't (both larger and smaller) were gasping for breath and panicking that they were having heart attacks/Covid when they did PE on return. The numbers you could see were overpronating due to lack of leg muscle strength, displaying anterior pelvic tilt and slumping forward because they no longer had the strength to hold themselves upright at a desk was ridiculous.

Whilst weighing will not provide data to support such things as loss of muscle mass, exercise tolerance or other measures of functional fitness (especially as many PE teachers were reluctant to put secondary kids through Bleep Tests because of the deconditioning and abject terror at feeling a little warm or out of breath ), it could at least demonstrate whether the proportions of higher and lower weight children have changed over the period of lockdown.

As a nation we’re getting fatter. And our idea of what is normal changes alongside - normal is “what everyone else looks like” and if that is overweight then overweight becones normal.

So I get that there needs to be a divide between “what everyone looks like” and “what is healthy”.

It's bad for a few reasons. Firstly it can create an issue around food and body image, rather than encouraging kids to listen to their bodies and eat Intuitively, we're bombarding them with messages of good and bad foods, and tbh dietary wise, those messages are baseless anyway.. NHS is still pushing the low fat methodology for some reason.

The whole BMI system is massively out of date and inaccurate. Did you know for instance, Black children are more likely to be classed in higher weight categories because the system isn't based on their bodies... so they're more likely to experience weight stigma and bullying as a result.

I know of instances where the kids knew exactly what it was all about and were rating themselves in the playground re their weight, these were reception kids.

Loads of kids have been incorrectly categorised and put on a food management path when they had no need for it in the first place. Focusing on food restriction and body size is exactly the kind of thing that leads to disordered eating and potentially eating disorders.

There's quite a bit about NCMP in the latest parliamentary inquiry into body image, its pretty damning.

Loads of kids have been incorrectly categorised

No. I think there is a lot of "of course he's not fat"

Actually thinking if myself, after I had IVF and an operation I gained over a stone. I've always been slim. In clothes I still looked slim but my BMI was 25.3 so just tipping into overweight. I wore size 10 clothes and people said I could possibly be overweight but I was 10 stone 11lb and had a little muffin top over my jeans. I was getting overweight but no one would have said I was.

*couldn't possibly be overweight

I think people misuse ‘puppy fat’ as well. I find with DD it comes and goes depending on her growth, she gets a bit of a tummy and then it does again as she stretches. It shouldn’t be there for years.

@starsinthegutter I don't think there is evidence that NCMP causes body image problems, or that black children are incorrectly classified.
Children aren't classified on BMI, but on the BMI centile for their age, based on measurements taken in the UK in the late 1980s. So children now are being compared with children from 1988, to put it simply.
Where I see a problem is that the parent letter either says "underweight", "healthy weight", "overweight" or "very overweight", and the model letter appears to combine "overweight" with "very overweight". There isn't a letter to say "healthy but heavy".
Literally, a pair of identical twins could get a "healthy" and an "overweight" letter if one happens to be constipated on weighing day.
The problem here is that, as seen on this thread, parents with "healthyweight" kids think they are doing great and that parents of overweight kids are slacking. The reality is that many parents who are feeding their kids a varied healthy diet and ensuring they get exercise are still too heavy. The "eat to your appetite" concept clearly isn't working. The elephants in the room are Big Food and Big Cars. Appetites are confounded by too-yummy food everywhere. Any effort to walk or cycle is confounded by too-big cars everywhere.
If the letters gave parents of "healthy but heavy" kids a warning, they might empathise more with parents of "overweight" kids. We all need to be working together to change the obesogenic environment.

DD is nowhere as skinny as I was in the 80s. But then I would take my bike and disappear for whole days from dawn to dusk with just a sandwich and crisps. Not something I could let her do (or she would want to do).

Whereas my 13yo DD is a lot skinnier than I was in the 80s. Individual cases don't mean much. It's the population as a whole we need data on - which is why it's so important to weigh all kids.

[quote BananaBreakfast]@starsinthegutter I don't think there is evidence that NCMP causes body image problems, or that black children are incorrectly classified.
Children aren't classified on BMI, but on the BMI centile for their age, based on measurements taken in the UK in the late 1980s. So children now are being compared with children from 1988, to put it simply.
Where I see a problem is that the parent letter either says "underweight", "healthy weight", "overweight" or "very overweight", and the model letter appears to combine "overweight" with "very overweight". There isn't a letter to say "healthy but heavy".
Literally, a pair of identical twins could get a "healthy" and an "overweight" letter if one happens to be constipated on weighing day.
The problem here is that, as seen on this thread, parents with "healthyweight" kids think they are doing great and that parents of overweight kids are slacking. The reality is that many parents who are feeding their kids a varied healthy diet and ensuring they get exercise are still too heavy. The "eat to your appetite" concept clearly isn't working. The elephants in the room are Big Food and Big Cars. Appetites are confounded by too-yummy food everywhere. Any effort to walk or cycle is confounded by too-big cars everywhere.
If the letters gave parents of "healthy but heavy" kids a warning, they might empathise more with parents of "overweight" kids. We all need to be working together to change the obesogenic environment.[/quote]
There absolutely is evidence, especially regarding racial discrimination. Look at the recent parliamentary inquiry, it's teeming with references and citations.

I'm quite late to the party here, but I remember being weighed when I was in primary school (about 17 years ago) and wanted to know if it's still done today.
For me, the method used to determine whether a child is overweight is incredibly flawed. Black children and adults tend to have a higher muscle mass then their white counterparts, which results in a higher BMI and inaccurate obesity diagnoses. At the time, my mum didn't know this and it resulted in her constantly reminding me that I was overweight. (You would be so confused if you saw my childhood pictures).

Just something to consider on such a sensitive topic.

I wouldn't let them weigh my dd as she was overweight at the time. I was trying g to avoid her developing the eating disorder she now has