AS A CHILD, I was conscious about the size of my thighs and the way my stomach rolled when I sat down.
Growing up in an era devoid of social media, my way of situating myself in the world was by comparing myself to friends as a child, reading magazines like Shout and Mizz as an adolescent, and absorbing the sentiments expressed by women in my family with regards their own appearance.
To all intents and purposes – especially when compared with the sheer number of unrealistic body ideals forced upon the youth of today – I was living in blissful ignorance, and yet, very early on, I internalised the idea that my body was only ever a work in progress.
And so did the girls who went before me, and the girls who went before them, and so on and so forth.
If you ask any one of them, they’ll have a story to tell about a moment in their life when they feared their body wasn’t ‘right’, a moment when they internalised criticism of their physical form or a moment when they actively sought to change an aspect of themselves.
In the late 90s when I was in primary school, it was common to teach Maths with the help of the students themselves - pupils were often weighed and measured to learn about graphs, metrics and averages.
20 years on, I still recall feeling uncomfortable with the approach, while another woman I know still resents the teacher who forced her to note her weight on a sheet of paper which was promptly fixed to the classroom wall.
At the time, the endeavour was nothing more than a vehicle for learning, and yet some children quickly identified the potential for bullying or shaming due to their own insecurities, and the simple fact that their number didn’t match anyone else’s.
Now imagine that the weighing of children in school wasn’t just an exercise in arithmetic.
At the Oireachtas Joint Committee meeting on Children and Youth Affairs last week, Anne Rabbitte called on the government to begin ‘normalising’ the weighing of children in pre school in an effort to curb childhood obesity.
Speaking on Newstalk Breakfast, she explained:
There’s nothing wrong about weighing, we should take away the stigmatising of it. If we’re really serious about it, weighing children and weighing is part of one of the components in gathering the data. You cannot gather data and have a database without the weight measurement.
If the memory of being weighed alongside your classmates for little more than a Maths lesson twenty years ago stills casts a long shadow, imagine what it will do to a generation of children whose weight is noted, sent home to their parents and acted upon?
As much as some people would like to pretend that the act of placing a pre-school child on a scales will leave little to no impression, they’re grossly underestimating the impact of those formative years.
And what happens after pre-school? Will primary schools be required to update this database?
Imagine what that will do to a generation of young people whose experience of school life isn’t specific to the classroom, but stretches beyond the corridors and into the world of online exchanges and cyber bullying.
Children are inundated on an almost continuous basis with images, messages and posts decreeing what constitutes a perfect body; the classroom should surely be a safe space from anything that taps into that problematic narrative.
Of course, the health and wellbeing of the nation’s young people should be paramount, so curbing childhood obesity is certainly a priority, but to approach the issue with nothing more than a weighing scales and a clipboard is a recipe for disaster.
Physical exercise through play should be encouraged, nutritional information should be disseminated and classes on self-esteem, self-worth and self-image should be commonplace.
While monitoring a child’s weight and recording their stats may help in some cases, it also acts as a platform for myriad other outcomes such as isolation, bullying, and warped views on what it means to be healthy.
Will the child, who has yet to shed their puppy fat, but eats a healthy and balanced diet be able to understand why they weigh so much more than a child who is naturally skinny, but subsists solely on a diet of frozen food and takeaways?
And what about the child, who already harbours concerns about their appearance due to the barrage of messages absorbed through both mainstream and social media? Will weighing them help to curb obesity or will it exacerbate the already complex relationship they have with their body?
On Sunday, Jameela Jamil, who established the body-positivity movement, i weigh, added her voice to the conversation, arguing that there is more than one way to approach the issue of obesity in children.
They did this to us at our school and by the end of the week we were all obsessed with our weight. I understand that there is an obesity crisis, but this seems like a problematic way to handle it. Weighing oneself is not the only/right way to monitor health.
The broadcaster’s followers responded in their droves, recalling moments in their own childhood when their weight was brought into question in the classroom.
In year 3 they weighed us and lined us up in weight order, lightest to heaviest, and I've never forgotten it. Learning something about kilograms... I dunno. I just know I left feeling ashamed of myself.
— Charlotte (@HitnMiff) September 30, 2018
Yup, I was the heaviest kid in my class at age 10, where we had to be weighed for an "all about me" topic that was put on the wall so everyone could see I was 8kg heavier than everyone else. Every girl in my class was kind, but the boys.... 😭
— Abi Þ (@NurseAbbers) September 30, 2018
I remember that. Luckily we could weigh ourselves, but remember lying, so mine was closer to everyone else. I was tall, and not particularly overweight then, but always felt massive.
— bethan browne #FBPE (@farnham73) September 30, 2018
Ugh yep. At the weigh in I was the heaviest girl in my class and was shredded by the other girls who now had a number to taunt me with. They weighed us for MATHS CLASS just to teach us about Percentages. Schools can be so blind sometimes. https://t.co/BYEmZz36XU
— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) September 30, 2018
Reducing children to nothing but a number is not the answer.
And it’s certainly not the answer if you value their mental and emotional health.
