Solutions to a pressing health problem are fighting an uphill battle:
But across the country, the new rules are also sparking a backlash among parents, children and even some teachers and school officials. The efforts often draw derision for being too extreme and demonizing children. Arkansas, the first state to pass legislation requiring schools measure students’ body-mass index, backtracked last month and now allows parents to refuse the assessment. The question of weight in Arkansas has been a sensitive one since former Gov. Mike Huckabee shed more than 100 pounds a few years ago and encouraged locals to follow his example.Rosey Barbour was a member of the Gillette “Task Force” that devised the health initiative. Her 12-year-old son Taylor, who attends Rawhide Elementary, was bullied for being overweight. Then in December, the family received a letter inviting him to take part in a fitness and nutrition program.
Seth Barbour, Taylor’s father, “was a little past mad,” he recalls, given Taylor’s sensitivity about his weight. The Barbours never told their son about the invitation.
While on the task force, Mrs. Barbour fought some of its initiatives, in particular the move to put BMI scores on report cards. “Everything the Healthy Schools Task Force has done has been controversial,” she says.
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{ 13 comments }
“the family received a letter inviting him to take part in a fitness and nutrition program.
Seth Barbour, Taylor’s father, “was a little past mad,” he recalls, given Taylor’s sensitivity about his weight”
Great parental response, deny a problem. Overweight could be addressed with sensible diet and exercise, which the school was offering. Instead, their denial went to the extreme of creating a powerful groups of like minded deniers. I’d like to know what kind of weight these parents are packing.
funny [seriously not!] how these dorks’ families make the hill to battle obesity steeper… the personal denial individuals have, translate into mob-denial- mentality, especially when their sensitive egos get validation from coverage by the media – with slant towards supporting these dorks’ self-esteem.
these kinds are everywhere in primary care clinics paid for by medicaid. they have problems with diabetes, musculoskeletal – mostly chronic back and knee pain, CVD, infertility in women looking to ride the PCOS bandwagon for disability [by God, they should not be having babies to begin with!],etc. and when a doctor like the one in Maine confronts them with their issues, he gets villified even by his own medical board, supported by the media sensationalist coverage!
God help the poor primary care docs!
I think you do need to be sensitive to the parents’ point of view.
I don’t understand the value of putting a BMI on a report card.
I would rather see more effort in encouraging kids to be fit than specifically focusing on weight.
Obesity, iike a lot of the rest of the New Puritanism, is quite simply no one elses business. Unless the parents are blind and quadraplegic, they know by sight or feel exactly how fat their child is. We have evolved this strange new ethic that heartily condemns anyone for commenting on the old sins, like adultery, however harmful they are to others, yet feel entitled to nag without invitation regarding strictly personal matters of health or happiness.
Anon 9:50 said “Unless the parents are blind and quadraplegic, they know by sight or feel exactly how fat their child is”
uh, wrong.
if you’ve ever worked in primary care you know that you should NEVER assume that anyone, even at 300 lbs., is aware that they are overweight and that this has health implications.
Obesity is everyones business! Well, I guess only if you are a tax payer or pay health insurance premiums to support the medical costs of obesity.
If you pay all your medical costs by cash out of your own pocket, don’t plan to recieve any public assisted disability, then go for it and stuff your face with the rest of the gluttons down at the Chuckwagon.
Oh please, everyone is currently bombarded with information about the health consequences of being truely obese. A handful adults in denial about their own state does not prove some rule.
Now the question is whether the school has any business dictating the size of a child. If somehow they do, the question becomes how to identify children who might actually need such a dramatic intervention. If they find some foolproof way of doing that, then there is the question of whether they can design a program that actually helps the child’s fitness (and prevents the horrific bullying a child would receive if it were widely know the child attended such a program).
Has there been any meaningful discussion of the first question? Not really, school districts just jump on the bandwagon without discussing this with parents. Then they test children by arbitrary and deliberately broad measures to “prove” the necessity of the program. Then they force/encourage children to attend workshops that are shown to make little to no improvement to whatever “weight problem” they might have been said to have.
I find it sad that so many people out there seem eager to have schools judge a child on his or her physical attributes instead of intellectual ability. What I find even sadder is that they want to do this without any clear evidence that the children will benefit from these shame-inducing programs.
I remember “height-and-weight days from my early-seventies elementary years vividly. (The public health nurse came, inspected our teeth, weighed and measured us and gave us the squinty eye looking for rickets and other outward signs we might need intervention from the state.)
Most of us, including my self, were rather unremarkable slender but adequately nourished specimens in reasonably good shape.
I remember just feeling so sorry for the fat kids. Extraodinary weights of the fat kids were a source of amusement. Weights were keenly observed by kids and comparisons made, and the standouts made to suffer a good deal of humiliation. “big Bertha’s” and “fat Fred’s” scale readings, called out for recording, for all to hear, became the chatter of the day, whispered among the politer children, but with plenty of howling jeers and derisive hoots from the raucous bad boys among the ruder children who made themselves important calling out the official heft of the fatties.
The tooth decay kids also had a hard time of it.
Kids compared and were so brutal to the ones the adults were trying to single out.
I don’t think it did anyone any good, except for maybe the ones with blet marks and ricketts.
You think report cards won’t get compared, or that crafty mean girls won’t make sure to find out martha dump-trucks weight and have some fun with it?
Why stop there, if you want to use that sorry worn out song and dance about your premiums or your taxes paying for obese childrens healthcare. First who the hell do you think you are that you assume you have any right whatsoever to inject your beliefs on our children?
Now lets talk about infidelity. You want to talk about fat kids, I want to talk about what diseases you are out spreading about that my premiums and taxes are paying to cure. I want to know exactly what you do every time you leave your house. if you go out drinking and get in a car accident…Sorry, I dont want my premiums or taxes paying for injuries you received from getting drunk. If you get yourself a case of STD I also dont want any part of my health ins premiums to pay for your cure. Actually, if a person is found to have repeat STDs I think that should be monitored and put in a public record. They are a health risk and the public has a right to know who you are.
In other words mind your own business. The size of any one’s child is not your business. Clean up your own health first. good God, are we so sorry that we actually think we have the right to do this to children.
Dinosaur commented on the subject on April 09. It seems in practical implementation of these rules, the school marked some 50s percentile kids as “in danger of being overweight”.
If a specific example Dinosaur mentioned is not an exception, and an average size kid told to be “in danger of becoming overweight” happens to be a pre-teen or a teenage girl, could it be just what she needs to become anorexic? This is of course completely uninformed concern – not being a doctor and not having kids, what do I know.
In general, I don’t have that much trust in this type of bureacratic solutions. Like zero tolerance policies for example, they often have completely unintended bad effects. Like in a modern Russian saying “we wanted to make it better, but it turned out as it always does”.
Wouldn’t a good physical education program and better school cafeteria menu as well as no vending machines with soda do more good? What is the point of checking kids BMI if the only thing sold in the cafeteria are french fries and hamburgers and soda?
Well, I pay the frieght for my own obesity and it is indeed no one elses problem. I pay health, life, and diasability premiums adjusted to match my increased risk based on my weight–yes they came to my office an weighed me! I pay the same rates into the social security pension fund even though I will likely collect far less than average–the benefit going to all of you skinny jogging selfish people trying to live forever. If I make it to retirement age, I will cost medicare something, but except for those of you hit by a car while jogging and declared DOA, we will all die sick eventually, but I will probably do it sooner instead of living long enough to get lots of other expensive disease. Put that in your self-righteous pipe and smoke it!
My name is Rosey Barbour and I am the person named in this blog. I am sorry to say that you did not receive the entire article otherwise, the stupid remarks of “great parental response” and “dork’s families” and “personal denial” would not have been made. My son Taylor is large compared to others in his class. He is the first of three children that Seth and I have. The other two – ages 10 & 9 -are both 70 pounds. Taylor has been tested to ensure he doesn’t have a medical condition (i.e. diabetes or thyroid problems). He doesn’t. It’s genetics. Taylor begun getting bullied when he was in first grade (by both classmates and the Principal) and because of that developed an eating disorder. That’s a hell I hope no parent or child will ever live with because of health freaks wanting BMI on report cards. I know my son’s BMI, I also know that we eat healthy in our home – we do not drink pop or eat junk food. I have no problem with them taking snack and pop machines out of schools – I grew up without them and survived. My problem is that they have taken away recesses to get more teaching time in to ensure our schools meet state standards. The Healthy Schools facilitator wants to take the one recess they have now and turn it into structured activity. None of the staff participates in the health class (leading by example). Instead our district pays for them to get fit. If the school district wants to put BMI on report cards because they believe weight affects the way children learn, then put teachers BMI on their sheets showing they are highly qualified and their weight doesn’t affect their teaching ability. You wouldn’t do that because it would be discrimination. Teach my child to be healthy but do not single him out because he is different than what society believes the norm to be. He is large, but he is healthy and active (football, wrestling and track) and he is not costing you, who choose to discriminate, a damn dime.
One last thing – to answer gasman and his ignorance, neither Seth nor I are “packing” any extra weight.
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