My daughter is 9 and she has a real first crush on this boy in her class. They are quite friendly, on Tuesday at school she came home and said they were making 'fat' jokes back and forth at each other. For instance, 'you are so fat we started printing a picture of you in October and it's still printing' 🙄 etc.
Today, however, she said she was sitting chatting with him about their queen Victoria drawing and he pointed at her stomach and said, 'look at you, you're so fat'. I said to her that he was obviously wanting to continue the game from yesterday but she said he wasn't joking, it was different and there was nastiness in the way he said it.
This isn't the first time this has happened. Another little boy in her class called her a 'greedy fat pig'. This was dealt with by the school as it really upset her.
For context, my daughter is completely average weight, she wears age 8-9 or 9-10 clothes, she is active and a gymnast, there really isn't a thing wrong with her.
It got me thinking, I remember being in first year at academy, also being a normal size/weight for my age and height and two boys would relentlessly call me fat in art class. I wasn't fat at all, I'd also done nothing to them, they just decided I was a target.
This really impacted on my view of myself and my body and has been something I've always been paranoid about. I can't ever remember a girl at school calling me fat.
Is this a normal occurrence? Or just what I have experienced?