My older son, who just turned 11, is 5'4".  That's tall for his age, way tall.  He also weighs somewhere between 80-100 lbs.  He knows these statistics not just because kids know these things (which they generally don't), but because he was measured today by a nurse at his school.  While I take a moment to ponder the necessity of this, especially since my son attends a private Waldorf (okay, stone me now) school, not a public school at all and not as such (I thought) under the jurisdiction of the state, let's examine the purported reason for such an invasion of a family's privacy.

According to this post at White Trash Mom, kids in many states including mine are being weighed and measured by their schools in order to determine their Body Mass Index (BMI; calculate yours here), a one-size-fits-all, slightly-better-than-the-old-weight-tables method of determining Who Is Fat and Who Is Not, which are being used by the school which then is sending a letter home to the parents to tell them if their child is "at-risk" for becoming overweight, or, worse, is already overweight.

Excuse me, but kids already know Who Is Fat.  Especially the Kids Who Are Fat.  Trust me, they know.  So is sending a letter home to the parents for "at-risk" children going to make a difference, other than to contribute to an already unnecessary and unhealthy cultural obsession with appearance?  Is this new practice, as White Trash Mom suggests, going to foster a sudden increase in eating disorders among children?  Yes, there are way too many kids who are overeight or bordering on overweight out there as it is, but is a written admonishment really going to make a difference?  How about, instead, some life-changing strategies of nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle that will serve the entire family for years to come?