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?
