To think we’ve lost sight of what a healthy child’s weight should be?

[Winniethepoohandtiggertoo]

Walking through town today as kids were leaving school and I was quite shocked by the size of them (primary kids). But then I noticed that so many of them were overweight that in a way it isn’t surprising that maybe their parents haven’t noticed or realised there is a problem? When I was little kids were skinny things, now it seems the norm for them to be built like shot-putters! I know a few parents with overweight children but they insist they’re ‘strong’ or ‘solid’, or ‘they run around so much they just burn it off’. When so many kids look like theirs it probably isn’t surprising they think that?

Don't forget that 'back in the day', a lot of kids were skinny because they were malnourished.

That is just as bad as being overweight, if not worse, due to the stunting in growth, brain capability, heat regulation, and more.

You often find the parents are also overweight. They don't say no to food so neither does their children.

We know very well how to reduce obesity, it takes a 360 degree approach where parents, schools, health providers, local councils, national government, retailers, food outlets etc are all involved in working towards the same goal.

Eg authorities design areas so you can travel to school actively, schools give healthy food, retailers don't promote excess consumption of unhealthy food, health providers give support programmes for people who want to lose weight.

It doesn't happen because there are too many vested interests. People make good money off selling stuff that makes people fat, then selling them stuff that promises to make them thin. It's easier to point the finger at parents. They have a role to play but it's only one part of the whole.

I get comments from DP family that my kids are too skinny , and that they need to eat more.
They are definitely not skinny , and according to NHS bmi they are perfectly normal weights for their height and age.
The issue is that all the kids on DP side of the family are overweight and they think this is the norm.
My eldest has a cousin the same age and height that is 2 stone heavier.
Noticeably chubby with belly and round face.
They think this look is healthier.
Its frustrating having to bat off the “ skinny “ comments to my kids without retorting that their kids are in fact overweight.
I obviously would never say to them as that would be incredibly rude.

My kids are a lot more active and do not eat the same amount of junk and snacks as their relatives.

I see some very overweight children at school pick up time.

Quantity plays such an important part in nutrition. Obviously too much healthy food will make you put on weight, the same with a big quantity of junk food. That's why people can eat unhealthy food and maintain a stable weight. Plenty of people also eat unhealthy food and put on too much weight. It doesn't mean that it's ok to be overweight just because the weight has been put on with healthy food. That's still unhealthy for you.

No, body shaming doesn’t cause harm by causing anorexia (though occasionally it does). It mostly causes harm by causing overweight people to seek more comfort in food and increasing their weight. People can’t change their eating patterns to healthy ones when they’re miserable because they’re being body shamed.

YANBU.
I work in a school and it's sad to me to see so many overweight children. I mean I'm a bit chubbby myself so don't want to be a hypocrite but I was skinny well into my early 30s.
My son is a bit overweight at 24. I blame it largely on his obsession with computer games which he prefers to being physically active.

I don't think the interesting thing is whether we've lost sight of how to have a healthy weight child or how to be a healthy weight ourselves, but why?

If an entire population gets fatter, and that includes the older women, men, and all the children apart from now a minority, doesn't that tell you something about the shitty hyperpalatable food and obesogenic environment in which they live. It's highly unlikely each individual person and family is somehow defective and unable to tell these things, it's more like the food we eat is less nutritious, even for those trying hard. Chickens are now full of fat and less protein. Even fruit is sprayed and often hard and weird. Meat bubbles with preservatives (I'm mostly veggie for this reason). If you go to parts of the world where they still grow and eat high quality local produce, rather than the products of the food industry complex we have in the UK, then people are slimmer (I mean if not slim through poverty) Eating high quality good food in the UK is only for very rich people now, who can afford what used to be normal meat and organic veggies. It isn't that people can't see properly what fat looks like, it's that even cooking from scratch in the UK delivers substandard food, see US for ultimately where this is all going. Domination of hyperpalatable food industry affects us all.

I bought several school dresses online from TU recently - when they arrived they were absolute tents and completely drowned my daughters, had to send them back. My daughters are very average sized. Getting school trousers is the hardest, my eldest is tall and average waisted (not even skinny) but I have to either take in the waists of her trousers or buy ones that have adjustable elastic waists. It used to be hard for people to buy clothes for overweight children, now I find it’s difficult to buy clothes for average/slim children.

One of the problems is that food really is so much nicer than 40 years ago when I was a kid, and the only olive oil I knew about was the stuff in tiny bottles from the pharmacy, that you would have definitely not have felt like drizzling over your Mighty White toast.

And a lot of processed foods are made deliberately, or as a happy by-product, to distort your sense of fullness and satisfaction. Even the posh ones. Sometimes especially the posh ones.

I had some Cornish Cruncher biscuits last night that were from an M&S hamper we got for Christmas. Fucking evilly good. I could have ate them until I was sick.

And even foods that are high in calories but part of a balanced diet in small amounts are easy to overeat. Nuts being a case in point. Who can eat just ten cashews?

My three children are underweight according to the Y6 weight screening programme, or whatever it is called. They all hover around 50-75th cent for height and 9th for weight, and that’s been consistent since they were babies.

It must be pretty unusual, because each time in Y6 we’ve been sent an unhelpful leaflet about switching to skimmed milk and low fat yoghurts, sugar free jam etc, which I assume is meant to be the overweight leaflet.

I’m sure genetics plays a big part - most members of my and DH family are built very similarly - tall, long limbed, slender.

They are all slow eaters - wonder if that makes any difference. I don’t think it’s because I don’t feed them enough - they often stop eating without finishing everything on their plates. They have a reasonable diet overall, and they both enjoy vegetables, but it’s not brilliant by any means - dc1 has Nutella or peanut butter on toast for breakfast most days, I offer pudding every day etc.

So I imagine it’s not really that simple.

Wearing clothes that are for children 5 to 6 years older than her and within the healthy weight range, are you being honest with yourself here?

Surely it depends on why? I have a 4 year old who needs 6 -7 dresses because she likes them below her knees. She's 115 cm tall. You can see her ribs though and her BMI is in the healthy range. She went to preschool this morning wearing 6 -7 tights, 3 -4 denim shorts and a 2 -3 dress as a t-shirt. She is as tall as some of her 7 year old brother's female classmates so of course she needs clothes as long as theirs.

Meal times are a bit sacred in our house. The DCs are at the table, they help with some of the food prep, it’s just about creating a food culture that isn’t “fill a hunger gap quickly before moving onto the more important activity”.

@SavoirFlair This is so important. We need to re-discover or create from scratch a healthy food culture, which is also about relationships, community, sustainable living.

I think the speed of change is terrifying, as are the concerted attempts to normalise it. The film WALL-E came out in 2008. Animated eco sci-fi, just my thing - except I did think that the immobile blob humans were an utterly bizarre invention. Only 15 years later, and it seems obvious where they came from! Another decade, and a hover-lounge patent, and we'll be there.

I was a child in the 70s. I'm in my 50s now. Pretty much all of the kids I knew were slim but none were skinny and malnourished.

The comment above about sharing a pizza as a family made me think about portions. When we first had a freezer when I was a teenager a standard frozen pizza would be dinner for my parents and 2 teenagers with a few chips and some peas. A quarter of a pizza each!

I remember always being hungry before meals. I think a lot of people nowadays have forgotten how to feel hungry because of constant snacking.
My dad was a big man but he didn't eat massive portions of food and never snacked.

A typical day when I was a kid was

Cereal for breakfast or a slice of toast
School lunch. I guess maybe a break time snack but I don't remember one.
A slice of toast or a biscuit after school if hungry
Whatever was cooked for tea - no choice. Something like mince, potatoes and peas. Small portions for adults, not much bigger than a kid's portion in a restaurant nowadays.
Tea and toast before bed if hungry.

Pudding on Sunday only.
Sweets once a week.
A standard sized bottle of fizzy lemonade a week when we were teenagers.
Takeaway fish and chips about once a year

It's a world away from the amount of food people (and I include myself in that) eat nowadays.

@Squamata - yes I agree with that. It is also possible that having a mother or even grandmother who yo-yo dieted at some point before having you could have altered your genes to the point that your body then tends to store more fat.
There are so many different elements that come into it. We know poverty is one.
It is a big cliche to talk about anorexic middle class mums with food obsessions. But to be honest, the ones I know were never anorexic as such - in fact, they maintained a healthy body weight all throughout their lives and hardly way a couple of kilos more after children than they did before children. And interestingly, the ones that come from posh families too that never really starved and were always rich are all naturally skinny. Eat a lot, exercise a lot etc and same applies to their children.
A less educated person is going to be more affected by advertising by companies trying to make money from unhealthy foods and then yo-yo dieting fads etc and purchasing magazines and buying into social media fads as well.
It is a very complex area.

People need to be able to make their own choices though and there is no appetite in this country for an even more controlling communist type nanny state that insists kids are delivered into the system age 2 and fed and exercised there. It is a free country foremost and people’s choices with regards to their own children need to be respected. The NHS and schools are already trying quite hard to tackle the issue. I don’t think government academic expectations help though because from what I have seen, there is simply not enough time to cover the curriculum with 30 children in a class and do PE more than 1 or 2 a week.
I would welcome a programme where every child exercise 30 minutes at school in assembly every morning Chinese style or at lunch on the playground dances, daily mile that kind of thing english.news.cn/20220525/3de8b101f1fe4aa882571ae1351fcd7a/c.html
If it is instilled at primary, there may be some hope at secondary schools. Nothing wrong with getting secondary school pupils to do Tik Tok dances if it is a cheap and good way to exercise. Of course if it is not instilled early, they are probably too embarrassed to do it.

@Nixynic I agree regarding clothing sizing.
I think clothing is made really big for kids now
I always have to use the waist button elastic thing to cinch in the waists on the DC uniforms / jeans etc.

“10.1% of reception age children (age 4-5) were obese in 2021/22, with a further 12.1% were overweight. At age 10-11 (year 6), 23.4% were obese and 14.3% overweight.”

That’s for England and as far as I’m aware is relatively evenly distributed between boys and girls. It would be extremely unusual for there to only be 1 female child in a whole class of a healthy weight. It’s a big problem but I don’t think exaggeration helps either.

I don’t think you‘re necessarily being unreasonable and I also think that there are probably more overweight kids around since the lockdowns, but I also think there are different body types and some people are just skinnier by nature.
I‘m not talking about „heavy bones“ or whatever, but I see it with our own kids - they more or less eat the same things, but two of them are skinny, while the third one never was.
She‘s always been a bit more on the chunkier side, even though one of her siblings tends to eat more than her and the other one has never been interested in any sporty activities outside school, whereas the one who’s a bit chunkier always had additional gymnastics/ dance/ swim or ice skating classes.
She‘s got my body type, whereas her siblings are more like my husband who was skinny as a child.
I excise daily and eat reasonably well, I‘m normal weight according to the BMI, but the only time I‘ve been skinny in my live was when I had an eating disorder, was starving myself and my periods had stopped. I guess my daughter is like me - she’s a teenager now and fairly sporty and fit, but definitely not skinny.

I think part of it is also the impact of undervaluing traditional women's work.

Childcare, cleaning, care for the elderly and disabled - women used to do it unpaid or barely paid. Cooking is the same.

Women are more likely to work now which I fully endorse, but we never stopped to question whether the traditional work had value and who would do it. Cooking from scratch, making meals a proper occasion where you sit together.

When both partners work, you're much more likely to serve up unhealthy food.

You know what OP? I live in the most locked down city in the world, where we were only allowed out for an hour a day, and where food was often the only thing ANY of us had to look forward to. One of my children was already seeing a dietitian for their extremely restrictive dietand anxiety makes their resistance to new foods worse. Ohand accessing that dietitian anymore? Don't make me laugh...allied health here is broken. And did we, as full time working parents who were also full time homeschooling probably give in to whining for treats too often? Absolutely--trying to do SOMETHING that was nice. So yes, one of my children is now overweight, but frankly, we're working on it quietly without shaming him, because all of the evidence is that shame only makes it worse. But for you to judge me and other parents in similar situations for doing our level fucking best in those situations? Yeah, you are being unreasonable, and you can hoik your judgeypants further up your arse and waddle off.

Yes,slightly off topic but Vertbaudet is great for slimmer kids. Great quality too.

I have one very tall slim dd and one just normal sized, normal height. They could snack constantly, never ending requests. I always feel bad about saying no but think they can't possibly be that hungry! But I absolutely see how easy it would be to handover a little snack whenever requested.

I wonder if it is fewer opportunities to exercise? I am 80s born and although did have lots of cooked from scratch meat, potatoes, veg I also was served frequent freezer meals. Crispy pancakes, waffles, mum used jar and packet sauces and I ate chocolate bars and crisps. Everyone else I knew was the same but I only remember a couple of children across all if school who were over weight - and I remember because they stood out so much amongst all the other regular sized children.

I’m sure build does come into it as well. I’ve got one daughter on the 91st centile for height and a completely beanpole and the other one is on the 25th and you can see they will have slightly different body types even if they both stay at a healthy weight. The tall one is always going to look thinner.

I also think demographics plays a massive part. My primary school is in an affluent area, lots of green space for them to play in etc and I can only think of one child who is overweight in my daughter’s class and he has additional needs. I suspect that may change when they get older but I’d bet money that the schools with higher proportion of infants being overweight are going to be in more deprived areas which suggests a wider societal problem not necessarily an individual one.

That’s for England and as far as I’m aware is relatively evenly distributed between boys and girls. It would be extremely unusual for there to only be 1 female child in a whole class of a healthy weight. It’s a big problem but I don’t think exaggeration helps either.
That was quite rude of you, it's a fact, not exaggeration. You can't decide that something is exaggeration because it's 'unlikely'. There are 7 girls in my daughter's class and 6 of them are overweight as confirmed by their Y6 check. There are significantly more boys and none of them seem overweight, at least not by a lot.

Okay thanks for ignoring the rest of it showing the harms of obsessing over a child’s weight they might grow out of causing life long issues because it doesn’t fit your narrative 👍

or do you have a suggestion on how to approach it so it doesn’t?