'Parenting should be left to experts, not parents' says NHS
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Well, I exaggerate slightly but what were they thinking? Apparently the parents of a sporty five-year-old girl have received a letter from their local NHS PCT in Bournemouth and Poole saying she has just tipped into the ‘overweight’ category for her height and age. The letter then outlined that she could be vulnerable to high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes in later life as a consequence of setting out on the road to obesity. Admirably, her parents have taken a sanguine view of the letter, unbowed by the guilt trip they have been invited to embark upon. See the story here.
If the child was obviously or seriously overweight I’d take a different view. However, her’s is a special kind of overweight. It’s entirely invisible to the naked eye. It’s unrecognisable to my fifty years’ experience of noticing other people. There is a video of her bouncing up and down on a trampoline. She looks entirely normal and even on the slightly wiry end of the body size spectrum, the way children sometimes are. She bounces, she cheerleads, she does ballet. I think that if a child shows every symptom of being normal they probably are.
No matter how long you looked at the pictures you would not guess that she was on the way to hell in a specially reinforced hand cart because of her weight. The PCT has been overzealous and unhelpful in its efforts to warn parents about the dangers of children being or becoming seriously overweight.
I realise some parents seem to be blind to their children’s weight gain and lifestyle, unable to recognise overweight or obesity. Or, if they are aware of it, they can be ill equipped to tackle it because they equate feeding with love, or they muddle their child's relationship with food with their own. There are a myriad of other competing pressures such as economics, knowledge, information or opportunity.
Here my perplexity comes from somewhere quite different. It turns out that the judgement of overweight is so finely tuned that neither this little girl’s parents nor I, nor you, could make that judgement without the interference of a) the state b) a team of experts – if you prefer something less emotive than my ‘state’ cliche. Not even a domestic bathroom scale will help. There has to be a pocket calculator and a chart too. Her ‘overweight’ is qualitatively absent. An expert observer with quantification skills has had to notify the parents and warn them of the possible grim outcome.
It’s not a deliberate attempt to undermine parents. I know that. But the system seems neurotic and weight obsessed. If obesity is the danger, 'state' warnings to parents as soon as there's the merest hint of overweight could promote familial behaviour that facilitates constant dieting and 'size zero' obsession later in life. Not good for boys or girls, little girls in particular.
But I like the sound of her mum. Good luck to her. She said was not going to be putting Lucy on a diet and would be carrying on with meals as normal. Quite right too.
