To complain about teacher weight comments

[jd88123]

My Daughter is in S1 aged 12 and was in biology class. Her teacher made them all weigh themselves.
My DD went through puberty age 10 and has boobs and a bum. Her BMI is 22 which is normal.
She said the teacher told them to "put 50kg down if you don't want to put your real weight as this is normal".
I am fuming about this as my DD is already weight conscious and has said she is going on a diet which I don't condone as she is healthy.
I think the teacher was very irresponsible to comment this and I sent a complaint about it to her guidance teacher which they've said they are looking in to.
I feel it's so wrong for children to compare themselves to each other as everyone is different. It's so damaging to their self esteem and at this age all girls especially have so much pressure to be thin and beautiful from the media.
Would you have complained?

"We've created massive shame around body types", the irony being the UK has the worst obesity rates in western Europe. It appears shaming doesn't lead to action.

We've created massive shame around body types", the irony being the UK has the worst obesity rates in western Europe. It appears shaming doesn't lead to action.
That's became its not discussed, health professionals are cautious around discussing it, clearly schools shouldn't bring any attention to it either.
Whereas in EE and Asian countries they treat as a health hazard and talk about it openly.

That is what I thought but I can see the issues that might stem from this. Even if the weights given to the teacher are anonymous, I can almost guarantee kids will be talking with each other afterwards as to where one or the other were on the distribution, and anyone found to be in the tails of the distribution would be a target for bullying. It might have been better to measure height which I would guess is a less emotionally stimulating characteristic of human size and unlike weight, you know when someone is tall, short or near average so no personal information is made public.

I would claim it is more because UK citizens are collectively trying to live like Americans with sedentary lifestyles, driving as the automatic default mode of transport (hence we have some of the most congested roads in Europe), widespread consumption of ultra-processed high calorie low nutrition food and a waahh waahh nanny state response whenever anyone in authority tries to advocate healthy living measures. The alcohol problem we have in this country doesn't help either.

Yeah, weight is unwise among teens. It just detracts from the task at hand. Height or something else like hair length would be much better. I would have been appalled to be publicly weighed in secondary school.

This is not true, anorexia is very much a biological illness that is triggered by weight loss. Genetics play a huge part in whether the weight loss will trigger anorexia or not. The anorexia gene is very similar to the schizophrenia gene hence the anorexic voice telling the sufferer not to eat.

Its therefore a lottery whether a child will develop anorexia if they lose weight, encouraging resilience etc will have zero impact and for the majority of sufferers recovery only requires regaining the weight they have lost.

All the anorexic behaviours are caused by the brain loosing significant amounts of fat reserves and matter when the body goes into a calorie deficit.

My dd has had anorexia and I am extremely educated on the causes and treatment.

The teacher was out of order instructing her students that it's fine to give a false answer. She should have told them that if they didn't want to record their weight they should write "decline to answer" in the space - not muck up the integrity of the whole survey.

Personally I think dumping this project on teachers and students is as idiotic a public health policy as anyone's come up with yet, but that's not the issue.

As for telling a presumably mixed class of adolescents that "50kg is normal" - I think you have there a teacher who just wants to hand the forms in and doesn't give a monkey's how it gets done. I can't imagine anyone would use the word "normal" thinkingly in this context. Some of her students might already be pushing 6 foot fall.

I'm not a teacher so no expert but i would NOT use weight as the variable to be investigated here. I presume it was maybe a statistics related lesson? Could have chosen any number of things but that's not a great one! I would have been mortified at that age to get weighed. (Also was overweight at that age but couple of years later after a growth spurt was normal) Wouldn't be happy if my kids had to do it either.

Probably wouldn't complain as I'm not a complainer but would just talk to my child about it.

Your lessons sound very boring tbh

Doesn't sound boring to me but anybody who uses 'tbh' is lacking. Your opinion isn't being honest, it's not stating a fact... and nobody cares.

I’ve been criticised for my opinion already , which I know fair enough , each person entitled to their own opinion , but at the end of the day the OPS daughter is only 12 , clearly the exercise in class has had a negative impact on her as now she wants to go on a diet & OP said is a healthy girl & healthy wealth !

I'm not up to speed on the detail but recording children's height and weight has been in the news as part of the anti-obesity public health strategy recently and the burden has fallen on schools.

And because school nurses are busy elsewhere it seems this is happening in the classroom, then, and not in private with due respect for confidentiality.

Outcome: poor quality data, upset children and harrassed teachers. Well done that master strategist.

I think the teacher has got no right to insist the children weighed themselves.
i say no when asked to get weighed at the doctors surgery . You are allowed to refuse . You don’t have to agree to everything a doctor or nurse asks you to do but people think that they have to.

Her teacher made them all weigh themselves

This in itself is an odd thing to do with a class of 12-year-olds.

The teacher didn’t make them weigh themselves.
She gave them a standard weight to use in the calculations if they’d rather not.
Why don’t you just read the op?

Do you think it might be a terrible attitude towards food and dieting!