Yesterday I took Ella for her one-year checkup. The nurse measured her height and weight (she got to stand up on the big kid scale this time!), and plotted her stats on the height and weight charts. She is 29" tall, which puts her in the 62nd percentile for height, and she weighs 24 pounds and 4 ounces, which puts her in the 96th percentile for weight.
After reviewing the numbers with me, the nurse said, "So she's average height and her weight is a little high. But we can't do anything about that until she is at least 2 years old."
I just looked at the nurse with a dumb look on face. "Do anything about what?" I asked.
"Her weight," she said.
Holy shit, I wanted to club the nurse on the head and say "You fucking idiot."
Ella is one year old. She is still a baby! Why would I want her to be skinny? Why would I want to "do something about" her weight? To me, the numbers say that she is above average for both height and weight, which means that she is healthy and on track.
I know that childhood obesity is becoming a very real problem in the United States. I understand that being overweight can cause certain preventable diseases. I understand that being an overweight child can lead to certain social problems and depression. But what kind of pressure is beneficial and healthy for kids? And how early?
Ella, she is just a baby. According to the American Obesity Association, "The term 'childhood obesity' may refer to both children and adolescents. In general, we use the word, 'children' to refer to 6 to 11 years of age, and 'adolescents' to 12 to 17 years of age." The nurse was clearly out of line with her comment, and I should have said something about it, but I didn't.
May 17, 2007
Fat Baby
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2 comments:
Not that I've ever thought that I might want kids. But it is this very issue - the weight one - that would give me serious pause if I were ever faced with the decision to have a child. I’ve thought particularly about how things would go if one day, a girl child was born unto me.
If I didn’t drown her on the spot, knowing that my experience of being born a woman has been as much a curse as ever a blessing, and wanting to spare someone that sort of fun - I’ve wondered about my ability to be a healthy parent.
Growing up as an overweight child had such a profoundly negative impact upon my life in so many ways (depression, inferiority, exclusion, low self esteem, feeling like an alien, challenging relationship with my father upon which an entire book could be composed). Then, there are all the problems that resulted from my efforts to correct that ill; to lose weight and become acceptable, or at least just to be treated the way i believed people of a normal weight were treated...which incidentally, were ultimately much worse in some ways than the issue of being fat to begin with - compromising my physical & mental health (not just in the short term, but making a conscious decision to adopt a mind frame that later, when I wanted to, I could not reverse), injuring my relationships w/ friends and family, and the potential financial ruin that could have come of the eating disorder...
So I think: what if one day you found yourself the mother of a girl child? With food and body image and exercise and weight weirdnesses that persist to this day, I certainly wouldn't ever be a model for proper nutritional practices or physical fitness habits. I wouldn't want to do what my mom did with me, which was to avoid any monitoring or restricting or commenting upon or directing what I ate (which she incidentally did because HER mother was constantly in fear of having an overweight daughter, and as a result would pose the question "do you really need to be eating THAT?" to my mom every time she picked up any food at all). And yet, to take the opposite approach and be too overly vigilant or conscious about eating and food would ensure that my daughter would develop an unhealthy relationship with food.
I've acutally imagined that trip to the pediatrician for the first check up...I’ve wondered, "If I were told that she were of above average weight, how would I keep myself from leaving the office that day and beginning to restrict my child's calories?" I worry that no matter how I attempted to handle it, no matter how good my intentions - I would almost assuredly produce an eating disordered child. Which, in my estimation, in many ways, is a curse and a burden worse than any other disease i can imagine a person having to bear....It’s like being schizophrenic and contemplating whether or not you want to take the chance of having a child who will have to also live with that disease…
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