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?

I remember reading something by a doctor that you should be able to see your children’s ribs. But unfortunately truly healthy and slim people are few and far between these days, 90% of everyone I come into contact with on any given day are carrying a bit too much. A size 10 is the biggest we ever used to be really in the 70’s, it was shocking to be bigger. Now it’s shocking to see a size 6-8.

obviously that’s filtered down to our children. Far too many convenience foods from cereal to bread to pasta sauces.

I feel it’s all linked to women working. As in-feminist as it may seem, when women stayed home and cooked good meals, we were all healthier.

Maybe it's a primary school issue 🤷‍♀️because it's not something I noticed in my daughter's secondary or in her friendship group outside of school. There are very few (less than a handful) of noticeably overweight kids in her school who stand out. All the girls appear to be very conscious of their looks and all the boys are skinny or sporty-looking. Admittedly, outside of school most of her friends are massively into horse riding, so can't e overweight or they wouldn't be allowed to ride. But even her friends from primary who went to other secondary schools range from fly-weight to slim.

Yep. When I was a child in the 60s we were nearly all skinny. If you couldn't see someone's ribs they were labelled fat. Junk food was a treat and we played out for hours.

Life is very different now.

Put h in the BMI calculator but change his age to 7 see what it says.

Unfortunately it's not nonsense. The data are clear - on average adolescents today are considerably bigger (as measured by both BMI and waist circumference) than their counterparts a few decades ago.) This does not mean there were no overweight children in the past or underweight children today. It means that at a population level we are fatter than we used to be.

Addressing overweight in early life is so important in order to get children on a healthier trajectory. Obesity is very difficult to treat and sadly very very few obese children become normal weight adults.

I do think a lot of it is portion sizes
when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s there wasn’t as much junk food about and it was more expensive
DM worked FT so didn’t have huge amounts of time to home cook but I remember what would now be eaten as a one person pizza split between 4 of us with lots of salad
Birds Eye burgers pack of 4 - we got one each with a 1/4 of a tin of beans and a slice of bread
thankfully the fruit bowl was always full

@Winniethepoohandtiggertoo fair enough. But I can assure you that DS is broad but skinny and overweight in terms of BMI but is now under the care of an nhs dietician and neurologist to help him gain weight.

He is what I'd describe as broad. So the width of his shoulders is much longer than average, his feet and hands are huge.

I guess that if you could see just DS' skeleton it would be wider and the bones would be bigger and more substantial (but not longer) than skeletons of people of the same height.

So maybe like comparing the frame or skeleton of a German Shepherd to that of a greyhound- both similar height and length but one has a very different frame to the other and can be much heavier but still a healthy weight.

Unless you’ve watched your child get seriously ill and disappear before your eyes SO quickly you’ll never know how glad you are that they have a little bit of puppy fat.

I’m happy my eldest isn’t whippet thin and I’m trying (and failing) to give my small one a little covering too.

I think people wildly overestimate how much physical activity there is in a child's sports class, or PE. They think how tired they would feel, as an adult who can swim, swimming non stop for 45 minutes. In fact, in a lot of classes the kids spend more time lining up for a turn than they do actually using any energy. They would get more benefit from walking to and from the class (fitness wise).

Once they are about 9-10, this changes but it's honestly not the fit and healthy lifestyle people claim it is. Not when you consider how much time they are sedentary, in cars etc. Kids were actually more active when they walked everywhere but had less structured classes.

I have been involved in childrens sport for 30 years. I know how much a child can put away and still remain fit and healthy. As long as it is a balanced diet a child can put away an enormous amount without putting on weight if they are active. When i say active i mean properly active. That is the issue i am highlighting. Kids these days dont get much oppertunity to be active, get the heart rate up etc. They spend most of their lives in the back seat of a car being driven everywhere. Most would never choose to take the stairs rather than a lift etc.

It is a class and poverty issue. There are hardly any obese children in private schools across the country both because the schools tend to exercise them most days and because the parents are often rich & educated and can afford a healthy diet. There are far fewer obese children in grammar schools and state primaries with a very low percentage of free school meals.
Fast and processed food is easier and cheaper. Cramming a certain class of people into the same schools and same jobs leads to obesity and poor health outcomes throughout life and costs the NHS more money.

There is also such a thing as a fat/starvation gene which you can inherit if you come from a poor background. It has been observed in the Netherlands due to the 1940s famine. It is also partly why a Chinese or Indian person who carries the gene is more likely to become Type 2 diabetic even if they don’t look properly fat to us. Anyway, it is a very complex area. www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dutch-famine-genes.html

Good nutrition, exercise, good education for all is at the heart of a healthy population that is productive. There should be a huge drive to eat local and seasonal healthy foods again in appropriate quantities.

Is this some kind of dig at breastfeeding?

You can't overfeed a ebf baby and FWIW my "chunky" ebf baby is a skinny, near the bottom of normal weight 12yr old.

Gosh that's so weird because one of my kids has been on the 3rd centile for weight since he was a toddler and teeters on the edge of underweight at times.

No one has ever ever commented on his weight. Not once.

I'm not a parent yet but it's something I do worry about - how to tread the line between our culture of processed fast food and conversely the image focused celebrity diet culture, particularly for girls.

I feel very lucky that I was instilled with a healthy attitude to food, but even then growing up as a teenage girl and young woman you pick up so much internalised shame. I do think that if I'd not had a good grounding as a child I could have developed a binge eating disorder

He's towards the overweight end not yet tipped into it. BMI calculators are a fairly blunt tool and for a small percentage of children and adults don't factor in other elements and therefore skewed.
My DS you can see his ribs which is normal for children of a healthy weight. I don't know whether it's bone density or what but honestly trousers fall off nothing fits because he's slim. The shorts with the button adjustable waist bands are on the tightest they will go.
Yet if I do a BMI calculator alone he's at 85%!

I get a bit sick of hearing this OP. My dd looks fatter than the average child but she exercises a lot and eats a healthy diet. She's going through puberty at the moment and I think the body holds on to weight during this process.

The school day is the only time she is sedentary with her having lots of after school and weekend sports. If anything, I think schools need to look at ways to increase physical exercise as dd complains that often they have had to sit all day due to wet breaks and just not enough room to move in their classroom.

Yes. I find this. I try to make nothing ‘forbidden fruit’ but it’s hard to control when they’re being given sweets everywhere. DD(7)s birthday she was given multiple big bags of sweets. She gets to keep a few to have when she wants and the others go in the cupboard for puddings for her - and usually shared with other DD - they are both pretty good about sharing. I don’t like being so controlling, but I don’t know any other way to stop them filling up on rubbish.

Mine are both a higher height percentile to weight and have consistently been so. I notice that in general mine get less processed food. Eg homemade flapjacks rather than a shop bought cake bar. I have noticed some of their friends that are looking heavier. In most cases they have divorced parents and at least 1 with a ‘Disney dad’ who sees their DC every other weekend but buys them whatever they want - they go back to their mums house with bags of sweets so she finds it hard to control. I wonder if this is happening more?

I also think more processed food for meals is to blame. If you’re working all day it’s easy to fall into the routine of grabbing something out the freezer for tea.

We have sweet things at home but it’s with other food - eg hot chocolate (made with milk, cocoa powder and a little sugar, not a pre-prepared super sweet one) with apple and cheese on toast for a post football snack. Or I might do fruit dipped in chocolate for pudding sometimes. But I do feel I’m constantly fighting to have a sensible proportion of ‘good’ food to ‘treats’ (I don’t call it that in front of them).

I thought I had imagined the one beef burger and a tin of beans between 4! that was us in the 70s!

I think you are right, it is supposed to be hilarious, which makes it worse, let’s all laugh at the fat kid , he is fair game and we aren’t allowed to laugh at any other kids with differences because that would be wrong. . There is another shot of him with a rubber ring , you can imagine the planning that went into that. “ Listen guys, how about this, we put a rubber spare tyre round his real spare tyre! Gosh, that will make them chuckle.”

One of the girls in my son's year is twice the size of all the other kids. It's not a small difference. It's very very pronounced.

The mum got a letter saying that her daughter was obese. Mum kicked off on the parents chat saying it was ridiculous and she "just didn't see it herself" and her daughter couldn't possibly be overweight because she's vegetarian.

Mum is not exactly Kate Moss herself. Nor is she the smartest tool in the drawer

Her reaction was eye opening and very revealing. It definitely showed me how some people are in complete denial and even those who think they are eating a healthy diet are utterly clueless. The amount of sweets and cakes etc this child gets is 'interesting' - it's clearly an issue with diet rather than being able to blame it on rogue genetics.

I do feel for the little girl as she hasn't got a chance. She won't ever learn good habits with food because mum is in denial about her own issues. The system has tried to flag the issue but it's toothless. I genuinely think it should be a subject for greater intervention early on because of the long term cost and implications to that child and society as a whole but obviously we are ridiculously short sighted as a nation on that one, parroting stuff about lack of money when a lack of early invention is more costly long term.

I am a similar age - we had no snacks. Sweet, chocolates, crisps etc were a once a week treat.

Small breakfast at home, big school dinner, made on the premises - like a meat pie, cabbage and mash. Always a pudding and custard though.. :) No choices, everyone got the same.

Tea would have been a decent homemade stew or similar. No pudding.

To be fair, I was always hungry and ready for that next meal- which is probably how it should be. Nowadays I snack too much - not unheathy foods but my calorie intake could be less.

We had only one or two 'fat' kids in the school. Not the class, but the whole school.

My DC is now mid twenties and when he was a chid I was surprised at the small portions he chose, despite his height (tall family). But I never forced him to eat more. He is still the same - eats what he needs and then stops. ( i finish my plate..)

From what I see on here there also seems very little real understanding about why children are becoming heavier, yes processed foods and a sedentary lifestyle don't help. However, schools are more focused than ever on academic attainment with little exercise. It's not their fault but really there needs to be more help, understanding for people than just saying 'they're all fat these days, in my day they were skinny'. Bit pointless and ignorant really.

Maybe this is true because my daughter is in a private secondary and as I said above, almost none of the kids at her school are overweight. If you watch them come out of school at pick-up time, there literally will be two kids who are visibly overweight. Same goes for the private primary she went to - I don't think any of the kids were overweight. Some were tiny, but even the "biggest" kids all looked slim.

Oh my goodness, we were far skinnier as a nation in the past. A relative has recently died and we’ve been looking at old pictures, there is one of about twenty women from say 1984. There isn’t one woman over a size ten, and they were all ages about 45-65. No men with beer bellies, double chins etc. As a nation we are much bigger now. Far more overweight children and adults.