5 year old told me she thinks overweight child will be horrible

[Cornflakesandhoney]

My 5 year old and I had a conversation that completely took me by surprise and upset me. Normally she's been a kind and considerate child and is so lovely with her younger brother. Today the conversation went...

DD: she's actually nice mummy. I haven't played with her because she's fat. But she can be nice actually.

Me: why would you not play with someone because of how they look? People are all shapes and sizes, have different colour skin, eyes, hair.

Dd: Yes but it looks horrible, all fat, all over her body

Me: ok. but you wouldn't like it if someone didn't play with you because they don't like the colour of your hair. It's about how kind people are. And if they make you feel good when you're with them.

Dd: hmmmm, OK. I've never told anyone this. I don't want to talk about it anymore more.

I left it there but I'm horrified that my child, whom we're trying to raise as kind and tolerant would think this.

Not sure what to think. This idea hasn't come from anyone in the family.

Anyone else experienced something similar?

What did you do?

It shouldn't surprise me that there are a lot of posters saying 'well she's right isn't she' but it does. You all need to take a good look at yourselves.

OP I think it's totally normal for kids to be prejudiced when they are little as they interpret all the cultural messages fired their way very crudely. I think all you can do is ask them lots of questions to make them work out for themselves why their assumption is not true. Eg 'do you think you and she are the same inside? Do you think she is kind/likes (whatever you like)? What made you like her?' You could even talk about what bodies look like and how that differs from what a person does it is like etc. I don't think you have done anything wrong - I don't think she is justified though obviously.

Dd: hmmmm, OK. I've never told anyone this. I don't want to talk about it anymore more.

I think I’d be most worried about the fact that what she’s learned here is to not talk to you about things like this.

The focus shifted from her learning that the other child is nice to how it wasn’t ok to feel anything but positive about her being overweight.

All the ‘be kind’ and being horrified about thoughts that don’t fit with this does is brush the issue under the carpet and, actually, in this situation, it sounds like learning that the girl is nice will have gotten lost in feeling bad about how she’s felt.

I wouldn't be surprised if other children in her class are saying this as well, that's probably partly where she got the idea. Kids are very mean.

This is a good point.

Look back at your responses to your child, OP - they are actually quite critical and might have made her feel bad.

It's probably better to just explore it with her - she will come to the same conclusion as you eventually.

Humans sometimes have inbuilt prejudices or prejudices we learn from other people - we just do. I think you made your daughter feel bad for having this. It's actually natural and we learn and grow by experiencing the world and things that challenge it.

DD: she's actually nice mummy. I haven't played with her because she's fat. But she can be nice actually.

Me: why would you not play with someone because of how they look? People are all shapes and sizes, have different colour skin, eyes, hair.

Dd: Yes but it looks horrible, all fat, all over her body

Me: ok. but you wouldn't like it if someone didn't play with you because they don't like the colour of your hair. It's about how kind people are. And if they make you feel good when you're with them.

Dd: hmmmm, OK. I've never told anyone this. I don't want to talk about it anymore more.

reading this account it sounds like you immediately jumped to criticism of her and acted on your horror that she might not respond differently to bodily differences.

If you’d focused on the rest of her statement and just ignored the bit about not playing with her because she’s fat, the conversation could have been much more positive. It could have built on how great it is to learn that someone is nice and all the fun she can have with a new friend. And even that we should always give people a chance because we don’t know if they’re nice until we play with them.

That’s probably going to have better long term effects than shaming her for having told you something you didn’t like hearing. She won’t be thinking about how nice the girl is any more, just that she needs to be careful about telling you that the girl is fat etc.

Also there are children who are on cancer therapies and steroids etc who will have an overweight appearance. Especially in their face which can look very rounded on steroids. How does this tie in with your “ alarm bells” and “ unnatural “. Not so different from prejudice over a disability now is it? Assumptions and judgement based on someone’s appearance are never a good idea.

I do think this is some in built prejudice against children who are different. I know it’s wrong but I do think we all have that when we are very small.
When I was little my mum used to drive a little boy with a disability to a club. I was too little to be left on my own so I would be in the car too. Mum would pick him up, drive him to the club and collect him again afterwards. I remember not liking having him in the car and not wanting to sit near him. I know it was wrong now, but it was how I felt at the time.

The thing is your DC has learned what she needed to learn. She'd made a judgment, it was wrong, she discovered she has been wrong to assume a fat child wouldn't be nice and has learned that someone who looks different to her can still be nice.

I'd say that's a good result and a far more effective way to learn than to be told to like everyone and definitely a better way to learn than to be shamed for voicing her assumption.

Surely we can cut a five-year-old some slack for getting things like this wrong? And especially because she's learned from it.

There's a child in DD's class who is getting on for three times her width and is a good foot taller (she is particularly small). I'm actually surprised she hasn't mentioned him to me as I'd be intimidated as a small child to play the sorts of games kids play with someone so much bigger than me. However, her school have an ethos of all the kids being friends and including everyone and seem to manage to put that into play successfully.

Children can shock you with views like this, my preschool son objected to a black presenter on TV, because she was 'skinny' then said he was scared of an old man on the bus because he was 'skinny' and I realised that by 'skinny' he meant black. I pointed out that his older brother's best friend, who he played with often and admired, had black skin too. He hadn't noticed, and actually denied it, until the friend next came to visit, when he realised!
There was no further mention of not liking people who were 'skinny'!

Disability isn’t unnatural either.

You’re going to have to accept that many people - even fat people like me - disagree with your desire to normalise obesity in children. Of course this doesn’t mean that we should allow our children to ostracise or otherwise mistreat overweight children, but nobody has suggested that. @Ohwellwhateverthen is only talking about having an understanding of where those feelings are coming from and not seeing them as a sign of a child being unkind or prejudiced.

i think it’s quite a grown up discussion for a 5 year old and you said the right things.

i might be reading into it too much, but it seems as though your DD has questioned her initial beliefs and is also uncomfortable about having had them (hence shutting down the conversation).

I’d let it go, but then namedrop the poor girl to see what reaction you get in a few days/weeks.

By making too big of a deal you might put your DD off talking to you about things like this or make her feel wrong even when she’s working through her feelings on her own and coming to good conclusions.

You're misrepresenting (or perhaps failing to understand?) the comments on the thread. Nobody thinks it’s fine for a child to speak badly of someone because they are overweight. OP is correct to address this with her daughter. People are only saying that it’s not a sign that OP’s daughter is unkind or nasty or anything like that; rather that her views, while they need to be challenged, can be understood. Understanding why a feeling exists does not mean that we condone it; I think this is what some people are struggling to grasp.

5 year olds are at the age when they start noticing different between people. And do say unpc things because they don't understand why x is different.

And yes other kids teach them this stuff by age 5.

I think it’s really important you don’t make your child feel judged for opening up to you, we need to keep lines of communication open.

Fat kids are unnatural and makes me as an adult judge the parents, so I can get that a child would feel the same, especially if they’re from a fit and healthy family. It’s good your child can see beyond the fatness that the child is s nice girl, maybe they could do some active play dates like trampolining to help her get fitter.

Yes, I'm sure the person who wrote "To be honest I think it's because there's actually something really disturbing about overweight children" is bringing their child up to be tolerant of differences. Great comprehension skills! 🙄

Nobody is saying assumptions and judgements are good.

We are talking about a very young child and a PP, who I agree with, has expressed an opinion that rather than this 5 year old girl being prejudiced and horrible, perhaps she is experiencing an in-built reaction to seeing something that she instinctively knows is not natural. It’s not natural to be fat. It’s not natural to have bright green hair. It’s not natural to have facial tattoos. A great many things could conceivably cause this feeling in a very young child. Nobody is saying “it’s good to be prejudiced against and refuse to play with people who are overweight/have green hair etc”; only that it should inform the way you approach the subject with your child. So rather than being horrified to have raised such a bigoted monster, perhaps it’s more sensible to approach it with some understanding that this 5 year old child is experiencing negative feelings about something that they perceive to be unnatural and we have an opportunity to acknowledge that, show them that we understand where the feeling comes from and that they aren’t a bad person, but then challenge the feeling and use it as an opportunity for growth and learning, as opposed to reprimanding them for having a very normal feeling for a young child.

And actually, although there was a poster making ridiculous comments conflating weight with race and disability in terms of being “unnatural”, young children do often have these visceral reactions to people with visible disabilities, people who are very elderly etc and it’s developmentally normal. Our job as parents is to challenge those views in an appropriate way, not to label our children as bigoted or prejudiced or make them feel shame and guilt. Thankfully my parents understood this when I was a child and was scared of an elderly relative who had a facial disfigurement. They could easily have made me feel terrible and ashamed which would have done nothing to change my reaction anyway and would if anything probably have reinforced it. Instead they empathised with my feelings but challenged them and helped me to see things differently.

Nobody is saying “it’s good to be prejudiced against and refuse to play with people who are overweight/have green hair etc”
Have you actually read the thread? Someone posted that they were annoyed that their son and his mates had to let a fat kid join in.

Because it meant the other children couldn't play the running around games they enjoyed. That isn't unreasonable. I think the school handled it badly and made the children more likely to dislike the overweight child.

The football situation’s easily solved, you always put the fat kid in goal, sorted.

This is a very good point.

"Be kind" as a catch all is dangerous anyway. On multiple levels tbh - not only does it instruct vulnerable children to ignore worries and prioritise other people 's feelings, opening them up to preditors, but it also tells them to pity and patronise the person they're inclined to avoid (implying they're less than and require kindness) and be nice out of pity, rather than actually value them as equals.

...being overweight as a child is disturbing. It's not a judgement on the child, at all, but it is unnatural and unsettling and as an adult it turns my stomach a little to see kids being failed so badly by their parents.

That’s not quite what she said, is it?

She said that the boys were being limited by the school in what they could play because of the apparently ‘fat kid’.

That’s a big problem and will produce perverse outcomes. It does boy promote inclusion or tolerance or anything useful. What’s happening is that the 5 year old boys are interpreting it as them not being allowed to play football because of another child. That’s dreadful.

But rather than deciding the boys are just awful and should be nicer people, maybe taking a completely different approach might help all of the children.

Similarly, having a bit of empathy toward the parents of those boys who do feel upset and aggrieved that they ‘can’t play football because of Tim’ might help. They’re children are unhappy, which isn’t ok. Just dismissing them as prejudiced won’t improve anything. It just pushes everyone further apart.

The way the school appear to be handling the situation is making things worse for everyone. There are better ways to support the child struggling in the peer group and to support the other boys to learn how much fun they can have playing with him. That’s the outcome where everyone wins. Even the parents.

focusing on the ‘unkindness’ doesn’t solve the problem around play priorities in any useful way. Solving that reduces the likelihood that people will be ‘unkind’.

That’s a wider issue around the ‘be kind’ narrative. Legitimate problems are brushed under the ‘be kind’ rug and anyone bring them up is demonised. So we never solve the problems or address clashes in priorities in positive ways. It’s much easier to polish our haloes and pretend we are better people than that.

It also seems to have polarised this thread into ‘be kind, you nasty people’ vs ‘overweight kids are disturbing’. Neither is useful in improving anything.

Well again you're misrepresenting the comment. That poster wasn't annoyed that her son had to play with a fat child; she was annoyed that her son wasn't able to play the normal playground games he wanted to play. Had the overweight child been willing or able to join in with the games her child wanted to play, that poster wouldn't have had an issue whatsoever.

As it happens, I think I would have been slightly more sympathetic than that poster and would have been encouraging my child to make an effort to include the overweight boy some of the time.

If we’re to tackle prejudice and discrimination then we need to be open about our thoughts and feelings. Why do we see particular groups of people as different to ourselves?

I don’t want to be prejudiced, but I am guilty of making assumptions when I look at someone. I actively try to challenge and question myself. OPs 5 year old had made an assumption and is now beginning to challenge it.