If you have a child in Reception or Year 6 and have just received a letter about weighing them, what do you intend to do?

[nkf]

Agree or not? Ask for results or not?

The main reason I have refused is because I am happy with my dds weight and so is she, we eat well,and have lots of excercise, as many other posters have said year 6 is a hard time for the children they dont need other children commenting on there size ,also at this age you cannot chart an average weight without taking into consideration a lot of other factors puberty,parents size,bone density ect some of our year 6 girls are well developed and probably approaching adult weight,some others still look like 7 year olds. Also they are small adults, how would we all feel if the goverment decided we had to line up and be weighed.

I worry somewhat about it, as DD is very very tall for her age and although very slim, undoubtably weighs considerably more than her friends. My concern is that they would all start comparing weights and DD would be upset that she is heavier than the other girls (although in many cases much slimmer).

I've expended a fair bit of energy getting her to see that her height is not an issue and that being tall has much to commend it - I'm slightly weary at the thought of having to go through the same exercise wrt her weight!

If it's just a gathering of anonymous statistics, how is that going to help the overweight children anyway?

When ds starts school I will refuse for him to be weighed, I know how much he weighs I don't need someone else to record it on his file.

Ds is 3.7 and his weight is between the 75th and 91st centile, his height is on the 75th centile. He eats really well and gets plenty of exercise so I am not unduly concerned.

And I have no idea where my children are on centiles. Have never used them even (especially) while breastfeeding them as babies. If they don't look overweight are generally well and active, then there isn't a problem imo.

This reminds me of when I was in the second year of senior school so must have been around 13. Our science teacher (male) decided to conduct an experiment on weight and body size so he got all the girls to stand up and asked the boys to sort the girls in a line according to how heavy the boys thought the girls weighed. Once the boys had done this we were made to stand on the scales to see how accurate the boys perception was. You can imagine how humilating this exercise was and the boys being teenage boys were not exactly tactful with some of the comments that were made.

princess, your ds is obviously not being weighed for your benefit! You know he's fine but the Statisticians find the data really helpful.

Statements like 'childhood obesity has increased by x% in the last 10 years' are very useful. We are a part of society and surely we do need to know this? or do we just worry about ourselves and ignore others. That seems quite selfish.

at that teacher though!

i think, if we had continued to do the amount of PE/sport lessons in primary schools that we did in my day, there wouldnt be half the problems with overwieght children. Im sure we had PE once a day, well it certainly felt like it as my main primary memory is prancing around in vest and big blue knickers!

Obviously what we feed them is our responsibility, but the lack of exercise becuase we have to fit in all these ruddy other bits and pieces on the curriculum now.

The government obviously knows that children are getting bigger, and far better to re-introduce the exercise than set children on the slippery slope of dieting. So, I remain dead against the school weigh ins.

Suppose exercise has been risk assessed as too dangerous and also too many health and safety issues......

How is a statement like that useful? What happens next?

I can understand that microwave but I guess that I am sceptical with anything done by the government these days. If I actually thought that they would do something useful with the data than I would agree to it. I am so sick of hearing stories of mismanagement of data by government organisations that I just can't be bothered with them. I know that sounds like a defeatist attitude but my own personal experience with government bureaucrats is not positive and over the years they have come up with so many ideas and initiatives that have not been followed through.

oh it will all be collated, placed on a disk and be sold on ebay no doubt!

juule its used to decide where budget is best spent.

So if the govnt has ringfenced £5o million say for children's issues' they have to decide if its better spent buying more playing fields to promote exercise or on building more librarys to promote literacy, for example.

so you can't complain about govnt wasting money if you're not going to at least try and help them have the right data for decision making.

hope my truat in govntt didn't sound too naive princess

'trust' even!

Oh god you are not a Labour MP are you?

if they are so concerned about chidldhood obesity, it is pretty obvious to me that the playing fields would be the route to take!

soz about bad spelling! cramming in the easter eggs as I type!

Are these the playing fields that have been sold off in recent years

more than likely juuule, well they had to find the money for the millenium dome from somewhere!

I don't understand why schools can't manage this tactfully so that the other children don't know. We were weighed every year by the school nurse, one by one, one child admitted into the room at the time.

They did at dcs school - not even the child being wieghed knoew what they weighed - never mind anyone else in the class