Healthy/happy toddler in 9th centile - anyone else?

[Holliejollied]

My 21 month old is in the 9th centile. He is a clever boy who is too curious about the world around him to sit down and stuff his mouth with food as much as his HV would like him to. He eats when he is hungry but has a small appetite. HV keeps reporting back to nutrition team that he is not eating enough. Today I got a call back from nutrition team with the silliest of recommendations: don’t give him water freely (he asks when he is thirsty, how can I not?!), limit his meals times to 20mins (so if he takes longer to eat his food, I then just stop and say, that’s it! Time up?!!) and don’t vary too much (right, pasta and chicken every night, then?)

I feel they are missing the bigger picture. I am very petite and his dad isn’t exactly a viking. He is also superrrr active. Constantly moving. We are also a very active family, always out and about. He’s also not too bothered by food. He eats when he is hungry, is then happy and giddy and growing smarter each day.

just feel they are wasting everyone’s time because of a standard that my DS must meet in terms of weight.

Rant over!

Is he dropping down the centiles or is he following his line?

Although I just asked about following his centile, my baby was a total chunk when he was young so dropped down the centiles massively as he started moving and he burned off his rolls 😂no-one was very concerned though.

Lots of HVs are never happy. In my case one month they told my DD was too heavy and next month another HV told me she is perfect so I wouldn't stress too much about what they say. Keep feeding him when he is hungry/thirsty and that's it.

My son has always been on the 9th, well born on the 25th but dropped quickly to the 9th and stayed there. Very active and healthy - he is now 12 and still on the 9th for weight. No one has ever been even slightly concerned about it though.

Well, except me I guess. Over the last few years his height centile has been increasing - he was on the 9th for height for years and now on the 50th(!). So I did contact the GP because according to the nhs bmi for children tracker this puts him in the underweight category. GP looked at his charts (which as above show him steadily on the 9th for weight all his life, and very slowly drifting upwards from 9th to 50th on the height) and concluded there is nothing to worry about, esp as he is active and exercises and hardly ever gets sick etc.

Someone has to be on the 9th centile - well on average 9 in every 100 are that weight or below, why is the HV particularly concerned about your son, is there an underlying concern?

@Icanttakethisanymore oh he was one chunky BF baby. No one would believe me when I said he was on BM only. But! He started crawling at 7months and quickly started dropping centiles. He’s now been in the 9th centile for the past few months. Hitting milestones etc though. Sleeping well etc…
rarely ill….he’s just tiny!!!

@Olika what a joke! Yeah I should just take it all with a pinch of salt but hard for
me to remove emotion from it all when they’re phoning me up while im at work with the silliest of advice!

How is his height? If height and weight are within 2 percentiles of eachother then you don't need to worry.
Also if he's tracking a a line rather than dropping down it's fine.
Some children are just small especially if their parents are!

@DuluxPaint nope, no underlying concern… hence my frustration. Your son sounds like my future son - active and happy!

@user2848502016 both height and weight in the 9th centile. He seems to have plateaued at 9th centile, yes. I am very small, a size 6 and a shorty. I don’t expect to have viking babies 😄

Oh and another thing I forgot to mention, he fits in clothes his age fine… perhaps just on the loose side? But he is wearing 18-24m clothes atm…

Someone's gotta be on the 9th percentile! I wouldn't be worried if I was you x

I'm 4' 9" and DH is 5" 7". I overheard an obstetrician telling a student doctor that unborn DS was "too small". He was the right size for me! He was 5lb 9oz at birth and ranged between 2nd and 9th centile. Now just turned 25, he's 5' 6". Not tall, but not that small, and healthy, attractive, intelligent and successful. This obsession with size is very much a UK /US thing. My heritage is Italian and no one there has ever had an issue with anyone's height. It's just not relevant.

Oh god I stopped seeing the HV as soon as I possibly could to avoid all this nonsense. He sounds absolutely fine. I'm considered underweight, BMI around 17/18 and the hoops they made me jump through when i was pregnant because of it - anyway had an over 9lb baby in the end. I would just stop going tbh.

@MadKittenWoman interesting. My heritage is Mediterranean and my DS is the perfect size where I come from 🤷‍♀️

@Lyn348 have same BMI as you myself but it wasn’t an issue when I was pregnant. I had put on so much weight 🤣 unfortunately where I am they come to you!