Lawmaker: Include child weight on report cards
By JANET ST. JAMES / WFAA ABC 8
DALLAS, Texas - Tamatha Hamblen is bringing her two children to the doctor because she's afraid for their health.
At age 12, her daughter Amber is about a hundred pounds overweight and already faces high blood pressure and diabetes.
"She probably wouldn't have gained so much weight if I had known how to take care of it," Hamblen said.
Lawmakers from Texas and New York are filing legislation that would require school report cards to include information about a child's weight.
Childhood obesity is indeed a serious issue; over the last three decades the number of obese children has tripled. Monday, Texas Agriculture Commissioner and self-proclaimed "cafeteria crusader" Susan Combs agreed to put her weight behind North Texas efforts to fight fat.
"We need to be disciplined for our children," Combs told an obesity symposium at Children's Medical Center in Dallas. "Their lives are literally at stake."
Combs has spearheaded efforts to rid Texas elementary schools of junk foods, but she's looking for serious community commitment.
"We didn't get here overnight, we can't reverse it overnight, but we cannot, I repeat we cannot wait another day," Combs said.
More than a third of school-age children in Texas are reportedly overweight. Children's Medical Center last year treated 9,000 for obesity-related medical conditions. Often it's a family problem.
"We let the parents know that if they can't see making changes in their diet, that we don't expect to have success with those kids," said dietician Elise Tyler.
"Many cultures and many parents feel that their child being overweight is attractive, and it's a sign of their success," said pediatric cardiologist Dr. Sarah Blumenschein.
Amber and her brother Jerry hope to succeed in losing weight as part of Children's commitment to fighting fat.
"Over the next six weeks, we're going to try to lose a pound a week," said Hamblen.
Doctors said parents are often in denial that their children are obese. If you want to see if you or your child could lose a few pounds, you can find out for sure by calculating your body mass index online with the CDC's online body mass calculator.
Child Weight on School Report Cards?
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TexasStooge
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unfortunately, i think that some parents choose to ignore and with it in print it would be harder to do so. don't really know what i think, yet. My whole theory is we have got to reinstate pe in schools along with recess. this would help tremendously . it would also help to relieve the stress of nothing but work at school all day as well. these kids don't even have a chance to know what fitness is anymore. they work all day at school - have hours of homework. so unless they are involved in community sports in elementary they have no idea how physical activity is good for them.
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CaptinCrunch
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I think it's a multi-cause problem with several solutions
I agree that all schools should have regular recess periods and regular physical education classes for all students. This is more important than in the past, because for many children today, especially those whose parents work, there are fewer opportunities to "go out and play" than in the past.
When I was a kid, you could just "go to the park." By the time my daughter was growing up, it was not safe to just send your child "outside" to play in many places. Today for most parents, I think it would be considered some form of neglect to just send the kids "outside" to play without fairly close adult supervision! Which means they can't ride their bikes alone, organize pick up baseball games alone, etc. etc. etc. So parents spend a bunch of time and money on "organized" sport-like activities. And a lot of those are not suitable for all children. My daughter was very small physically and almost 2 years younger than the other kids in her class. The "sports" activities available were not right for her. I spent a fortune on ballet lessons, ice skating, skiing, swimming and other physical activitiy "lessons" for her because she needed the physical activity, yet the organized stuff with her classmates was not appropriate. We are talking about a lot of money here! If I had had a lower paying job, more kids, etc. I would not have been able to do it. As it was, I was barely able to do it. And even "normal" stuff was expensive. When all her friends had 10 speed bikes, she was physically too small for one and my aunt paid a fortune to have one "cut down" for her so that she could ride it instead of a "baby bike." (When she went to junior high, she had Guess jeans because they did not make other brands small enough to fit her--she actually fit into bigger Health-Tex--you can't send a kid to junior high in Health-Tex!!! She did eventually make it to 5 ft.--but in college).
Because she was an extreme case, I saw the problem. But more "normal" kids may have the same types of problems and it may not be as easy to see. It would have been very easy for her to have become an overweight "couch potato." I was an overweight child. I was not good at any types of sports and games and the other kids hated to have me assigned to their teams, etc. I think there are others like me who should have been channeled into sports that are more of an individual challenge rather than competitive team sports (I have lousy coordination).
Another problem is diet. American parents are very ambivalent about their children's eating habits. I watched my peers anxiously try to stuff food into their kid when they were little, well-meaning parents who catered to their children's likes and dislikes to an extreme and, I think, unwittingly gave their children terrible eating habits. Unless a child is truly ill, it will not hurt them to miss a meal or too--and I think children, like adults, go through periods where they are hungry and eat everything in sight, and other times when they just aren't hungry. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they don't grow a little bit each day, but in fits and spurts. In our house, we put the dinner on the table. And what did not get eaten got taken away after a reasonable period of time. Guess what? If the child only eats a little today, they will make up for it tomorrow. The child will not starve. Similarly, children who don't like/eat X food today, may well eat it next week if you don't make an issue of it. But so many parents think that the meal has to be balanced on a meal-by-meal basis. Not so, as long as it balances out over time. I've noticed that a child may not eat anything green one week, but the following week eats double helpings of everything green! Go figure. But over time it works out. But if you make a huge deal of what they eat/don't eat, after a while you have very finicky children who only eat waffles for breakfast or only eat macaroni and cheese or peanut butter and jelly or some such. Not a good thing.
I also think that children who get food stuffed into them are probably getting "too much" food at least some of the time and that it affects their ability to know when to stop eating because they don't trust their bodies to tell them when they are full." This is complex and unscientific, but here's my basis.
My childhood was not good. And my parents had a thing about telling you that things "did not hurt." As a consequence, as an adult, I do not have a good sense of what hurts and have a lot of trouble describing pain, etc. Among other things I am allergic to novocain... but also have some other anomalities about how I handle anesthetic, pain killers, etc. And I have had things really, really, really hurt but I couldn't really judge this... I've actually walked around with broken bones because I did not know they were broken because of some mental shutdown of the pain... The mind is a powerful thing... If someone can be taught to ignore or deny the pain of multiple broken bones that are clearly visible to an observer, I can well understand how they can learn to ignore their body's signal that they are "full."
Then there is the question of what people eat. Prepared foods and even semi-prepared foods often have unexpected ingredients and inordinately high quantities of sugar, salt, etc. If you make french fries at home by chopping a potato into the appropriate shapes and dropping them in hot grease to "fry" them, you have potatoes that are "less healthy" than if you boiled or baked the potato. But these are very different from the commercially prepared french fries that are coated with some mixture of sugar and salt and cornstarch so that they will fry up (or fry in the oven) to be crispy, golden brown regardless of the skill of the cook, etc. Adding salt to the "from scratch" potatoes and adding sold to the "prepared" ones gives you a very different result in terms of total sodium. And the results are probably still "better for you" than the ones from the fast food place. But a lot of people resort to the convenience of the fast food places (and the kids want to go because of the advertising, because their friends go, etc.) and the net result is that kids develop a taste for this unhealthy food...
Prepared cereal is an extraordinarily expensive food--and I personally never bought it because (a) I did not grow up eating it; (b) it was expensive and an easy way to cut the food budget was to not buy it and buy bulk rolled oats instead--or even to feed my child something like tuna fish for breakfast instead. But a lot of it has less than desirable ingredients and even the "healthy choices" are expensive and provide lots of empty calories. And for a lot of it, the nutritional value is from the milk and sugar people put on the stuff to eat it--not from the cereal itself. I know it is "un-American" not to feed your children breakfast cereal, but I don't think it is good for you. I'd rather give my child a bowl of rice, or a baked potato or a tunafish sandwich or a hardboiled egg.
A lot of the "advertised" foods--especially the snack foods--are simply awful and if you read the ingredients, you would not eat them. From what I can tell from reading the label on a Twinkie, for example, there is nothing recognizable as "real food" in it. The shelf life of those things is about 200 years for a reason... I do not think that most "junk foods" that come in bags and boxes and packages are at all the "same" as the foods they are supposed to resemble. In other words, eating a home-made cookie and eating the packaged cookies are not the same level of eating habit at all. The homemade cookies (flour, sugar, baking soda, eggs, milk, etc.) are a lot better for you than the things you buy commercially. But we have taught kids to like the commercial stuff.
The bottom line is that the food industry has taught Americans to buy their products, has undermined a lot of people's confidence in their own cooking, and is not delivering good nutrition.
School lunches have also changed dramatically and if you have not eaten one since you were in school, I think it will be a real eye opener! You would not believe what passes for "food" in school cafeterias these days.
When I was in school, school food was prepared in the cafeteria buy a bunch of grey-haired, middle-aged women "from scratch" for the most part. It was pedestrian, predictable, and no one liked it very much. But everyone at it anyway (or most of it most of the time). Monday it was meatloaf (made from hamburger, breadcrumbs, etc. and decorated with tomato paste) and mashed potatoes and overcooked peas; Tuesday it was some form of baked or stewed chicken (with bones--we got real silverware in those days--not sporks to eat with) and more mashed potatoes, more overcooked green vegetables, and on Wednesday it was some form of overcooked (well-done) roast something (beef, pork, etc.) and Thursday it was some sort of concoction made from leftovers from previous day (might be chicken a la king, might be some type of "hash" etc.) and Friday it was some form of fish. Somewhere rice or noodles might get substituted for the mashed potatoes. Occasionally you got pasta. Everything always had gravy on it. The vegetables were always overcooked. And yes, there was dessert: almost always jello or pudding. Sometimes fruit cocktail. Most kids' mothers made them eat the "hot lunch," and those kids whose mothers did not make them eat the "hot lunch" were envied. Note that you also got at least 1/2 hour for lunch, which meant you actually had time to get the lunch, eat it, and relax and let it settle a little before you went out to play &/or back to class.
Of course back in those days, lunch was at "lunchtime" and lots of kids who lived near the school and who had stay at home moms actually went home for lunch!!! Impractical and impossible these days. Besides, the school would never allow it.
20 years ago, the old women who actually cooked on site were gone and the food was largely pre-prepared food that got heated up at the school. Much of it was fried. A lot of it was "junky" food--there was pizza, and some slop that purported to be "Chinese" food and greasy burgers and greasy chicken patties, etc. It was pretty awful. No one ever made their kids eat that slop. Brown bagging it was the "fashion" and most of the kids did so. Some kids who lived near the school were still able to "go home" for lunch.
Today, the stuff they serve in school is little better than what you can buy from a fast food place or a street vendor and probably the street vendor's stuff is better for you and more sanitary, etc. The kids are drinking cokes, eating potato chips, and calling it "lunch"--and that is if they have time to eat it! The school schedules are insane! There are kids who have "lunch" at 10 a.m. and others who have "lunch" at 2:15 p.m. and the lunch breaks are 15 minutes or so...
There is some sense that if the school serves it or has it available, it should be "appropriate, adequate, nutritionally correct, etc." And this just is not true! The stuff available to eat in school is not. Apparently if Pepsi gives the school a few free computers, there are Pepsi machines in the hallways. If some other purveyor of junk food donates something else, their products get sold in the school. It has nothing to do with caring about the kids and what they eat and all to do with advertising and promotion.
For individual parents, the problem is bucking the system. The kids are correct when they complain to their parents that "all the other kids...." (are allowed to eat the school food...)
It is a multi-pronged problem with solutions that also have to be multi-pronged but the problem will not be solved by the schools and will not be solved by sending kids home with their weight on their report cards.
I think that parents today are really caught in a bunch of conflicting traps. They expect that the school was the way it was when they were there. More of them work longer hours for less pay (in terms of what it will buy). They have less help from other parents, from relatives, etc. There is more pressure than ever on them and on their children from advertising, etc. If they complain about the school's junk food machines, soda machines, etc. they are "knocking the American way" and "seeking to deprive the school of essential learning tools" and so on. When parents go in to complain about stuff, they are told/made to feel that they are the only parents who feel this way, think this way, etc. and that the school is staffed with professionals who somehow know better than the parents do, etc.
(As an ex-teacher, I can tell you that is a bunch of cr*p, but teachers used to try that with me, so I know they use it on other parents as well... To be honest, I know a bunch about some very specific subject matter, but in the grand scheme of things, I certainly don't know the definitive answers to any important questions outside my specific subject areas--I'm just a human being like the rest. Having taught did not make me a better parent, etc. myself, so why should it give me the right to tell other parents what to do except in my specific subject area... I might have ideas or suggestions, but they are just that.)
Anyway, my wholehearted sympathies go out to the parents who are caught in this and I'd like to see some dramatic changes in the schools and espcially in areas like what goes on with recess, lunches, classroom management, etc. Far too little time is spent teaching and far too little is done to help the teachers in the classroom--but also far too little voice is given to the parents.
There are no good or easy answers...
When I was a kid, you could just "go to the park." By the time my daughter was growing up, it was not safe to just send your child "outside" to play in many places. Today for most parents, I think it would be considered some form of neglect to just send the kids "outside" to play without fairly close adult supervision! Which means they can't ride their bikes alone, organize pick up baseball games alone, etc. etc. etc. So parents spend a bunch of time and money on "organized" sport-like activities. And a lot of those are not suitable for all children. My daughter was very small physically and almost 2 years younger than the other kids in her class. The "sports" activities available were not right for her. I spent a fortune on ballet lessons, ice skating, skiing, swimming and other physical activitiy "lessons" for her because she needed the physical activity, yet the organized stuff with her classmates was not appropriate. We are talking about a lot of money here! If I had had a lower paying job, more kids, etc. I would not have been able to do it. As it was, I was barely able to do it. And even "normal" stuff was expensive. When all her friends had 10 speed bikes, she was physically too small for one and my aunt paid a fortune to have one "cut down" for her so that she could ride it instead of a "baby bike." (When she went to junior high, she had Guess jeans because they did not make other brands small enough to fit her--she actually fit into bigger Health-Tex--you can't send a kid to junior high in Health-Tex!!! She did eventually make it to 5 ft.--but in college).
Because she was an extreme case, I saw the problem. But more "normal" kids may have the same types of problems and it may not be as easy to see. It would have been very easy for her to have become an overweight "couch potato." I was an overweight child. I was not good at any types of sports and games and the other kids hated to have me assigned to their teams, etc. I think there are others like me who should have been channeled into sports that are more of an individual challenge rather than competitive team sports (I have lousy coordination).
Another problem is diet. American parents are very ambivalent about their children's eating habits. I watched my peers anxiously try to stuff food into their kid when they were little, well-meaning parents who catered to their children's likes and dislikes to an extreme and, I think, unwittingly gave their children terrible eating habits. Unless a child is truly ill, it will not hurt them to miss a meal or too--and I think children, like adults, go through periods where they are hungry and eat everything in sight, and other times when they just aren't hungry. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they don't grow a little bit each day, but in fits and spurts. In our house, we put the dinner on the table. And what did not get eaten got taken away after a reasonable period of time. Guess what? If the child only eats a little today, they will make up for it tomorrow. The child will not starve. Similarly, children who don't like/eat X food today, may well eat it next week if you don't make an issue of it. But so many parents think that the meal has to be balanced on a meal-by-meal basis. Not so, as long as it balances out over time. I've noticed that a child may not eat anything green one week, but the following week eats double helpings of everything green! Go figure. But over time it works out. But if you make a huge deal of what they eat/don't eat, after a while you have very finicky children who only eat waffles for breakfast or only eat macaroni and cheese or peanut butter and jelly or some such. Not a good thing.
I also think that children who get food stuffed into them are probably getting "too much" food at least some of the time and that it affects their ability to know when to stop eating because they don't trust their bodies to tell them when they are full." This is complex and unscientific, but here's my basis.
My childhood was not good. And my parents had a thing about telling you that things "did not hurt." As a consequence, as an adult, I do not have a good sense of what hurts and have a lot of trouble describing pain, etc. Among other things I am allergic to novocain... but also have some other anomalities about how I handle anesthetic, pain killers, etc. And I have had things really, really, really hurt but I couldn't really judge this... I've actually walked around with broken bones because I did not know they were broken because of some mental shutdown of the pain... The mind is a powerful thing... If someone can be taught to ignore or deny the pain of multiple broken bones that are clearly visible to an observer, I can well understand how they can learn to ignore their body's signal that they are "full."
Then there is the question of what people eat. Prepared foods and even semi-prepared foods often have unexpected ingredients and inordinately high quantities of sugar, salt, etc. If you make french fries at home by chopping a potato into the appropriate shapes and dropping them in hot grease to "fry" them, you have potatoes that are "less healthy" than if you boiled or baked the potato. But these are very different from the commercially prepared french fries that are coated with some mixture of sugar and salt and cornstarch so that they will fry up (or fry in the oven) to be crispy, golden brown regardless of the skill of the cook, etc. Adding salt to the "from scratch" potatoes and adding sold to the "prepared" ones gives you a very different result in terms of total sodium. And the results are probably still "better for you" than the ones from the fast food place. But a lot of people resort to the convenience of the fast food places (and the kids want to go because of the advertising, because their friends go, etc.) and the net result is that kids develop a taste for this unhealthy food...
Prepared cereal is an extraordinarily expensive food--and I personally never bought it because (a) I did not grow up eating it; (b) it was expensive and an easy way to cut the food budget was to not buy it and buy bulk rolled oats instead--or even to feed my child something like tuna fish for breakfast instead. But a lot of it has less than desirable ingredients and even the "healthy choices" are expensive and provide lots of empty calories. And for a lot of it, the nutritional value is from the milk and sugar people put on the stuff to eat it--not from the cereal itself. I know it is "un-American" not to feed your children breakfast cereal, but I don't think it is good for you. I'd rather give my child a bowl of rice, or a baked potato or a tunafish sandwich or a hardboiled egg.
A lot of the "advertised" foods--especially the snack foods--are simply awful and if you read the ingredients, you would not eat them. From what I can tell from reading the label on a Twinkie, for example, there is nothing recognizable as "real food" in it. The shelf life of those things is about 200 years for a reason... I do not think that most "junk foods" that come in bags and boxes and packages are at all the "same" as the foods they are supposed to resemble. In other words, eating a home-made cookie and eating the packaged cookies are not the same level of eating habit at all. The homemade cookies (flour, sugar, baking soda, eggs, milk, etc.) are a lot better for you than the things you buy commercially. But we have taught kids to like the commercial stuff.
The bottom line is that the food industry has taught Americans to buy their products, has undermined a lot of people's confidence in their own cooking, and is not delivering good nutrition.
School lunches have also changed dramatically and if you have not eaten one since you were in school, I think it will be a real eye opener! You would not believe what passes for "food" in school cafeterias these days.
When I was in school, school food was prepared in the cafeteria buy a bunch of grey-haired, middle-aged women "from scratch" for the most part. It was pedestrian, predictable, and no one liked it very much. But everyone at it anyway (or most of it most of the time). Monday it was meatloaf (made from hamburger, breadcrumbs, etc. and decorated with tomato paste) and mashed potatoes and overcooked peas; Tuesday it was some form of baked or stewed chicken (with bones--we got real silverware in those days--not sporks to eat with) and more mashed potatoes, more overcooked green vegetables, and on Wednesday it was some form of overcooked (well-done) roast something (beef, pork, etc.) and Thursday it was some sort of concoction made from leftovers from previous day (might be chicken a la king, might be some type of "hash" etc.) and Friday it was some form of fish. Somewhere rice or noodles might get substituted for the mashed potatoes. Occasionally you got pasta. Everything always had gravy on it. The vegetables were always overcooked. And yes, there was dessert: almost always jello or pudding. Sometimes fruit cocktail. Most kids' mothers made them eat the "hot lunch," and those kids whose mothers did not make them eat the "hot lunch" were envied. Note that you also got at least 1/2 hour for lunch, which meant you actually had time to get the lunch, eat it, and relax and let it settle a little before you went out to play &/or back to class.
Of course back in those days, lunch was at "lunchtime" and lots of kids who lived near the school and who had stay at home moms actually went home for lunch!!! Impractical and impossible these days. Besides, the school would never allow it.
20 years ago, the old women who actually cooked on site were gone and the food was largely pre-prepared food that got heated up at the school. Much of it was fried. A lot of it was "junky" food--there was pizza, and some slop that purported to be "Chinese" food and greasy burgers and greasy chicken patties, etc. It was pretty awful. No one ever made their kids eat that slop. Brown bagging it was the "fashion" and most of the kids did so. Some kids who lived near the school were still able to "go home" for lunch.
Today, the stuff they serve in school is little better than what you can buy from a fast food place or a street vendor and probably the street vendor's stuff is better for you and more sanitary, etc. The kids are drinking cokes, eating potato chips, and calling it "lunch"--and that is if they have time to eat it! The school schedules are insane! There are kids who have "lunch" at 10 a.m. and others who have "lunch" at 2:15 p.m. and the lunch breaks are 15 minutes or so...
There is some sense that if the school serves it or has it available, it should be "appropriate, adequate, nutritionally correct, etc." And this just is not true! The stuff available to eat in school is not. Apparently if Pepsi gives the school a few free computers, there are Pepsi machines in the hallways. If some other purveyor of junk food donates something else, their products get sold in the school. It has nothing to do with caring about the kids and what they eat and all to do with advertising and promotion.
For individual parents, the problem is bucking the system. The kids are correct when they complain to their parents that "all the other kids...." (are allowed to eat the school food...)
It is a multi-pronged problem with solutions that also have to be multi-pronged but the problem will not be solved by the schools and will not be solved by sending kids home with their weight on their report cards.
I think that parents today are really caught in a bunch of conflicting traps. They expect that the school was the way it was when they were there. More of them work longer hours for less pay (in terms of what it will buy). They have less help from other parents, from relatives, etc. There is more pressure than ever on them and on their children from advertising, etc. If they complain about the school's junk food machines, soda machines, etc. they are "knocking the American way" and "seeking to deprive the school of essential learning tools" and so on. When parents go in to complain about stuff, they are told/made to feel that they are the only parents who feel this way, think this way, etc. and that the school is staffed with professionals who somehow know better than the parents do, etc.
(As an ex-teacher, I can tell you that is a bunch of cr*p, but teachers used to try that with me, so I know they use it on other parents as well... To be honest, I know a bunch about some very specific subject matter, but in the grand scheme of things, I certainly don't know the definitive answers to any important questions outside my specific subject areas--I'm just a human being like the rest. Having taught did not make me a better parent, etc. myself, so why should it give me the right to tell other parents what to do except in my specific subject area... I might have ideas or suggestions, but they are just that.)
Anyway, my wholehearted sympathies go out to the parents who are caught in this and I'd like to see some dramatic changes in the schools and espcially in areas like what goes on with recess, lunches, classroom management, etc. Far too little time is spent teaching and far too little is done to help the teachers in the classroom--but also far too little voice is given to the parents.
There are no good or easy answers...
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TexasStooge
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vbhoutex
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When I was in school weight and heigth were part of the report card and of course we had recess or pe too. I understand where those who are against it are coming from but the information was just that information for the parents as I presume it would be now unless someone chose to make it otherwise.
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Skywarn, C.E.R.T.
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weathermom
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Some great points persepone! My elementary school kids get 20 minutes after lunch to play outside (weather and wildlife permitting). They don't get any other recess. They haven't had one since kindergarten. K-2 children need to let off some steam in order to sit still for class. The older (grade3-5) kids can sit through class without running around for a while, but it is still a long haul if the weather is bad or there are bears on the playground and the kids are stuck in the library after lunch.
I have a neice who has an issue with weight. It doesn't need to be on her report card. She hears about it from the other kids, her mother, and the pediatrician. Does anyone really think putting it on her report card is going to make her problems suddenly go away?
I have a daughter who is quite thin. She eats like a horse and could still be used as a skeleton in anatomy class. She is one of those people who never stops moving. ever. On her "fitness report" it listed ways for her to reduce her body fat. Young girls are very conscious of their looks and particularly how "fat" they are. This report could have caused my daughter to try to lose weight and possibly damage her health.
These kids have enough pressure on them, they don't need any more.
I have a neice who has an issue with weight. It doesn't need to be on her report card. She hears about it from the other kids, her mother, and the pediatrician. Does anyone really think putting it on her report card is going to make her problems suddenly go away?
I have a daughter who is quite thin. She eats like a horse and could still be used as a skeleton in anatomy class. She is one of those people who never stops moving. ever. On her "fitness report" it listed ways for her to reduce her body fat. Young girls are very conscious of their looks and particularly how "fat" they are. This report could have caused my daughter to try to lose weight and possibly damage her health.
These kids have enough pressure on them, they don't need any more.
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no, that is unapproapriate.
Most parents now a day, work during the day and get home well after the child gets out of school... and they are unaware of activities they are doing while they are at work. The child will get home from school, grab something to eat and watch TV. I know... my brother and I did that.
Obviously, the parents take the children to the doctor so they know how much they weigh. My step-dad tried everything with my step-sister to get her to lose weight... it didn't happen, she refused to do work.
Maybe we should have 'biggest loser' for children.
Most parents now a day, work during the day and get home well after the child gets out of school... and they are unaware of activities they are doing while they are at work. The child will get home from school, grab something to eat and watch TV. I know... my brother and I did that.
Obviously, the parents take the children to the doctor so they know how much they weigh. My step-dad tried everything with my step-sister to get her to lose weight... it didn't happen, she refused to do work.
Maybe we should have 'biggest loser' for children.
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Weathermom's comment about the impact on self-image when weight is put on report cards of "normal" or "skinny" kids, especially when coupled with tips on losing weight is very important!
Whether a child is "underweight," "normal" or "overweight" is something best determined by the child's pediatrician--not by fashion consultants, teachers, others who do not have specialized knowledge.
Convincing children, especially girls, that they would be even better looking if they were thinner leads to serious problems such as anorexia, bulemia, etc.
I do not think this is, or should be, the role of the school.
And yes, "fat kids" know it. Their parents do, too. They don't need yet another reminder.
Whether a child is "underweight," "normal" or "overweight" is something best determined by the child's pediatrician--not by fashion consultants, teachers, others who do not have specialized knowledge.
Convincing children, especially girls, that they would be even better looking if they were thinner leads to serious problems such as anorexia, bulemia, etc.
I do not think this is, or should be, the role of the school.
And yes, "fat kids" know it. Their parents do, too. They don't need yet another reminder.
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SouthernWx
I saw this story on the news, and something about it just sent chills down my spine. Isn't there enough govermental and school invasion of privacy already taking place without putting a child's weight on their report card? 
What next? Arresting parents who allow their kids to become "too fat" in the school principal's eyes? Allowing DFACS and the courts to remove children from homes where they eat too much?? I don't have any kids, but those type of thoughts scare me.
I know some kids are far too heavy at an early age nowadays, but from what I see in this area....that's the extreme rather than average.
None of sis's kids are overweight....99.99% of the kids I see in area malls aren't freak show size blobs ready for Oprah or the Maury Povich show.
During my school years (age 7-16), I went from a very skinny boy to a rather heavy teen...and my parents did nothing wrong to change my eating habits. Most of it was the result of me outgrowing asthma....and asthma medications that left me nervous, hyper, and without an appetite. Mom pleaded with me to eat; my pediatrician tried all sorts of vitamins....trying to get me to eat and gain weight.
A couple years later, my asthma all but gone, and without the appetite sapping medications, I began to eat things I'd formerly turned my nose up at....hot dogs, spaghetti, and chocolate cake for example. Add in my mom's (and her dad's) genetics, and suddenly I was a 5'6"-190 lb eighth grader....then a 5'7"-230 lb 16 yr old (plus the fact I began weight training at age 14).
Should my weight have been plastered on the report card....my mom and dad embarrassed, or perhaps called by DFACS or social workers because their son was getting too fat? Heck, I knew how fat I'd become.....because those taunts of "stringbean" and "four eyes" during the 4th grade became "Perry, Perry 2 by 4" and "Lardazz" by the 7th
Just my 0.02 cents worth...
What next? Arresting parents who allow their kids to become "too fat" in the school principal's eyes? Allowing DFACS and the courts to remove children from homes where they eat too much?? I don't have any kids, but those type of thoughts scare me.
I know some kids are far too heavy at an early age nowadays, but from what I see in this area....that's the extreme rather than average.
None of sis's kids are overweight....99.99% of the kids I see in area malls aren't freak show size blobs ready for Oprah or the Maury Povich show.
During my school years (age 7-16), I went from a very skinny boy to a rather heavy teen...and my parents did nothing wrong to change my eating habits. Most of it was the result of me outgrowing asthma....and asthma medications that left me nervous, hyper, and without an appetite. Mom pleaded with me to eat; my pediatrician tried all sorts of vitamins....trying to get me to eat and gain weight.
A couple years later, my asthma all but gone, and without the appetite sapping medications, I began to eat things I'd formerly turned my nose up at....hot dogs, spaghetti, and chocolate cake for example. Add in my mom's (and her dad's) genetics, and suddenly I was a 5'6"-190 lb eighth grader....then a 5'7"-230 lb 16 yr old (plus the fact I began weight training at age 14).
Should my weight have been plastered on the report card....my mom and dad embarrassed, or perhaps called by DFACS or social workers because their son was getting too fat? Heck, I knew how fat I'd become.....because those taunts of "stringbean" and "four eyes" during the 4th grade became "Perry, Perry 2 by 4" and "Lardazz" by the 7th
Just my 0.02 cents worth...
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Skywatch_NC
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I believe it's a good idea. Some parents don't seem to have a clue how obese their child is. I've mentioned their child being very overweight to several parents attending parent teacher evenings at the school, and some are seemingly unaware until it is brought up by myself.
Under Oregon law, I have a legal obligation to report any child in my class who appears to have signs of abuse or neglect. If a five year old boy or girl is so obese and out of shape they cannot play at recess or p.e. because they are out of breath, that child is in just as much danger as a half starved or abused child. It is shocking to realize there are today five and six year olds in this state who are already on medication for high blood pressure and cholesterol. In the vast majority of cases, it's due to a complete lack of activity at home and a parent/ parents who utilize no guidance or supervision regarding what or the amount of food their child eats.
I have witnessed children fighting because they attempted to take other children's lunches for themselves, after eating theirs and wanting more. A very overweight boy recently told me the school lunch he ate was "just a snack"; he ate three times as much for dinner at home, and two large snacks between his arrival home from school and dinner, plus more junk food after dinner (IMO 5000 calories daily for a six year old? No wonder he already weighs 120 lbs and resembles a the shape of a beach ball
Under Oregon law, I have a legal obligation to report any child in my class who appears to have signs of abuse or neglect. If a five year old boy or girl is so obese and out of shape they cannot play at recess or p.e. because they are out of breath, that child is in just as much danger as a half starved or abused child. It is shocking to realize there are today five and six year olds in this state who are already on medication for high blood pressure and cholesterol. In the vast majority of cases, it's due to a complete lack of activity at home and a parent/ parents who utilize no guidance or supervision regarding what or the amount of food their child eats.
I have witnessed children fighting because they attempted to take other children's lunches for themselves, after eating theirs and wanting more. A very overweight boy recently told me the school lunch he ate was "just a snack"; he ate three times as much for dinner at home, and two large snacks between his arrival home from school and dinner, plus more junk food after dinner (IMO 5000 calories daily for a six year old? No wonder he already weighs 120 lbs and resembles a the shape of a beach ball
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