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?

Thank you to those of you with useful and helpful feedback. Think I'll make sure I explore the positive with her next time and gently challenge the assumptions. It's all part of the parenting journey I suppose!

Disability/ race are different from weight, you aren't born overweight. You can't change your Disability or race.

I shouldn't have to tell you this. But people shouldn't be judging what the quality of a person is based on their outside appearance. cf the video of the big tattoed bloke helping the old lady with her shopping across the road if you need a visual representation of this.

That said, 5 year olds will do this and need to be gently challenged. OP I think in the general scheme of a good relationship you displaying shock at first is not going to fuck your 5 year old up forever and she probably will tell you stuff again if it is her habit anyway. As a rule I always think if I don't know what to say (often) asking questions is a good way of starting.

This, absolutely this.
Oh but I'm waiting for someone to jumo on this and say 'maybe the girl is fat because of a healthy problem and can't help it', rather then the much more likely option that her parents feed her rubbish and don't make her exercise. Poor poor girl.

So if there'd been a child with a physical disability that couldn't join in then what? Nothing wrong with school encouraging them all to be more inclusive in the games they were playing.

I'm surprised to read so many comments saying it is normal for a 5 year old to be repelled by an overweight child. I don't think it would have bothered me at that age, and I know in DS's year (Y3 now) there are two fat children, and none of the other children see it as any kind of issue. They certainly don't find them repellent or exclude them from games.

I don't think you said much wrong tbh.

That's the brutal honesty of children - they say how they feel until they're taught to lie.

How many MNers talking about tolerance here would marry a very obese man? Are those who would not be attracted to an obese person prejudiced or unkind?

This poor child should of course be treated with kindness and consideration, but we don't have to pretend that to be obese in childhood is just another way to be. Obesity isn't something you're born with and it's not a normal physical state, especially in children.

The example was pretty much exactly of a child with a physical disability - the issue wasn’t just his size, it was that he was not physically able to play their favourite games. That may be because of his size, it may be the cause of his size, they may actually be completely separate issues.

And either way, in trying to be inclusive the school seems to have created a situation where a bunch of wee boys resent another wee boy because now they can’t play football. Which doesn’t exactly achieve inclusion, and certainly won’t lead to their being ‘kind’. The school should be figuring out a way of including which doesn’t lead to resentment - find the less football mad boys and work on something fun with them; (as someone suggested) bring in equipment for appealing new accessible activities, that sort of thing. Or encourage him to be a referee (I know they normally run madly, but in a school game they could be pretty static and just watch…) or find another more positive outcome.

Kids often need their exercise at break; they are cooped up in the classroom for so long (by their standards) - this inclusion is coming at the cost of the wellbeing of all the other kids, which is not inclusion it is prioritization. And that would apply no matter what the disability.

Really interesting thread and I’m sure lots of us would have reacted like the OP rather than focussing on the child’s important recognition (that we are more than our looks).

As a child, I too gravitated towards the pretty kids (but actually, this was as much, if not more, about the way they seemed very cared for). The most popular child in primary was adopted and was, looking back, clearly very loved, with the best hair styles (!) and outfits, and even clear nail varnish which I always admired, rather than any actual bone structure-type beauty! We always had a “fat kid” and a “smelly kid”. They had no friends. This was the 1970s. Shocking.

I think it’s all about fitting in. Not liking the outliers. Whoever they might be (& I’m black in a white area, so was also an outlier, so was probably especially keen to “fit in”, to understand the norms). The research posted above, about small kids not liking the fat child in the scenario, was very interesting.

There is literally no excuse for the bigoted fat bashing posts on this thread. You people are the reason that 5 year olds receive messages it is ok to prejudge the quality of ANYONE based on how they look or assume that you know anything about them in fact. Dress it up any way you like but these posts are just at heart simplistic bigotry and the worst thing is you are bringing your kids up to be judgemental and closed minded too.

Sexual attraction is completely beside the point (but is based on individual experiences and as cultural as anything else if you look at standards of beauty across the ages).

@Mardyface clearly the op was NOT condoning fat bashing, it was the first thing she alerted her child to. What she didn’t do was praise/focus on her child for looking beyond the other child’s appearance. Posters on this thread are discussing the prejudices. Where do they come from? Why do small children not want to play with the “fat child”? Or, according to the above research, the disabled child? Is it some innate thing? Clearly as people mature, like the 5 year old daughter, they understand that fat/etc is not linked to whether the person is nice! Look, I’ve been fat in the past, and it was horrible. People were very prejudiced against me. Or so I felt. I think they judged me as ugly, therefore stupid, and also not cool. Where did this come from, since I felt it about myself too.

Except that’s not necessarily true. Babies as young as three months old show preference towards people of their own ethnicity (Study).

By six to nine months, this may also include a negative association with people of other races too (Study).

OP I think you handled this perfectly. Children need to be gently challenged on prejudices. It doesn’t mean they are ‘bad’… They are just making sense of the world and it’s our job to raise them to accept people regardless of race/size/disability etc.

It's not "ick factor" but our natural empathy makes us feel for someone who has an injury or in some cases a disability (when you see someone who's obviously in pain, you may feel a twinge of sympathy pain, and children will often ask people with visible disabilities, "does it hurt?", and adults may imagine it hurting/wonder if it hurts).

So even a child, who is old enough to feel empathy, can react in this way to someone who looks different and looks like they have a difficulty. I don't think it's wariness, but a natural and probably generally good type of empathy.

There is no reason this would be the case for someone with a different skin colour - a child who has not met many people with different skin colour may ask "are you black/white under your clothes" or "does it come off when you wash" or "are you an albino" but this isn't "ick" or even empathy, just lack of knowledge and social norms, plus curiosity.

I had this too. We had a family friend who had a child with Downs, I was really frightened of them. It was the unexpected noises she made (I was really shy and timid and the other child used to make all sorts of sounds in situations where you were meant to be quiet eg at the theatre). I certainly grew out of that.

Children do notice differences, they are allowed preferences, but it’s a fine line to teach them about prejudice.

I agree but I don't think the school did it very well if other children were unable to enjoy playtime. My grandson is full of energy if he was prevented from running about and playing football it would affect him badly. That school's action clearly had the opposite effect to what they intended and made the other boys resentful.

That's not what the school were doing in banning football and making the children (or the male children only possibly in that post) play an un-thought- out and unattractive alternative.

There is also often a conflict of genuine need - a conflict of need between disabilities even. Many children with ADHD for example very much need to be able to run around during every available break and would get into trouble in class and be unable to access lesson content if forced to be sedentary all day.

Inclusion doesn't mean making everyone sit down because there's a wheelchair user, or banning verbal communication because there's a non verbal person in the group - it means adapting activities so everyone can take part, or offering a range of attractive options suited to a range of talents, abilities and skills and interests and so not everyone has to do the same thing - not banning sports.