Today a health visitor told us that our two-and-a-half year-old son is overweight. You know health visitors, don’t you? Those people who come round to your house every once in a while and make you feel bad about yourself as a parent?
It was a health visitor who told us that our eldest son was having nightmares because he was afraid of us. It was a health visitor who told us that our two month-old baby should be in a routine by now, and that we should have potty-trained Noah. (This is the same Noah who is, apparently, overweight.)
You’ll notice he’s eating blueberries.
In fact, I’m struggling to remember anything a health visitor has said which has actually been helpful; but that’s another story.
We know our son is not overweight, because we feed him. Therefore, to state that he’s fat is to tell us that we’re doing it all wrong. How can a two-and-a-half year-old be overweight? And even if he is a little podgy, so what? When I was young I was always told it was puppy fat, that I would have a growth spurt and it would all even out. And I did, and it did too. (I put it all back on after marriage, obviously.)
If the health visitor had their way, we would be placing our son on a strict diet, denying him the odd chicken nugget or chocolate Digestive and placing a plate of broccoli and ham in front of his turned-up nose. After we’d forced the food down his throat, we would take him on a brisk walk to the park, where he would do ten sit-ups before going on the swings, but not for too long because all he’s really doing on the swing is sitting, and that’s not exercise.
I was listening to a show on Radio 4 (yes, I listen to Radio 4) the other day in which the comedian Jo Brand spoke about how childhood is a thing of the past. I couldn’t agree more. My son eats his fruit and his veg, and he also eats chocolate. He also happily runs around, plays games, and has fun. And I’m not about to deny him that just because someone has looked at lines and centile charts and deduced that our happy, healthy two-and-a-half year-old is a fatty.
What a stupid woman she probably has no experience is bringing up children and she can’t look past her stupid charts, my 18 year old has just had a baby so she was visited by a teenage support midwife and she compared our family to the philpots who set there house on fire
jesus christ, that is one fat fucking baby! maybe you should put him on the feeding tube diet:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/diet-brides-feeding-tubes-rapidly-shed-pounds/story?id=16146271#.UHxcu8WJmSo
i don’t put much weight (no pun intended) in growth charts and milestone trackers. who cares if your kid is a few pound under or over or a few cm under or over. and does it really matter if your baby rolls over at six weeks or eight weeks? not to me. if there was something wrong, i would know. if my child was overweight, i would know, i do have eyes after all.
i really can’t believe anyone would suggest that child is overweight, it’s beyond ridiculous. if anything, i’d say you’re lucky, it is a CONSTANT battle to get my daughter to eat anything, a cheerio, one bean, a bite of steak, you name it, she won’t eat it. i would LOVE not having to worry if my child was getting enough to eat.
I have the opposite problem, mine were always too thin! To have failure to thrive written across every chart is actually quite tough especially with your first child! Well 12 years on we still haven’t made the centile charts ( I was always under 7 stone pre babes so a clue in the genes) but he can outrun all of his classmates, run 10k no problem, has a black belt in karate and does a couple of hours of sport a day. No he hasn’t made it into a higher centile position, but thriving ? You betcha!
Do not let these ‘visitors’ into your home. I went to one of these people, just once, after my son was born (he is about to turn 20). She was pushing 40, single and childless, and told me, amongst a load of other rubbish, that I had to stop using nipple shields when feeding iMMEDIATELY, as my milk would dry up. She told me it was the touch of a baby’s lip on the nipple that produced milk. Considering I had a SIL who for weeks fed practically an entire NICU ward of prem babies (incl her own) just by pumping, and a friend who fed successfully with shields for 6 months, I knew it was bollocks. I laughed all the way home and never went back.
I fell out with our health visitor, or rather she fell out with me from her first visit.
She told me our youngest was looking very yellow. I suggested that was racist and the correct terminology was ‘child of mixed heritage’ as he was half-chinese.
To be fair he did have jaundice, and I was only joking, but as she scribbled down her notes straight faced I realised this was no place for humour however poor in taste
Never got any useful information from a health visitor – and we moved a couple of times when my kids were babies so I had about three of them. It was always friends who were parents who made all the helpful suggestions.
I was told my two-year-old didn’t have enough words in his vocabulary because I gave him a dummy. Well now he’s six and never shuts up – particularly about dinosaurs so his vocab includes archaeopteryx and scelidosaurus.
Stick that in your health visitor pipe and smoke it!
When I plunged into PND and collapsed in a heap in my GP’s office, he told me the health visitor would be in touch and sort me out with some counselling. I phoned, in tears, two weeks later to say I hadn’t heart anything (good job I wasn’t bloody suicidal wasn’t it?!) She eventually called me back and said “I am rather busy, you know?” I was speechless.
Wait til he gets to school and the stupid NHS health workers come to do the weighing and measuring of your 5 year old. My son is a full head taller than every other kid in the class. They sent me a letter telling me he was ‘obese’. I was furious and rang up to ask if the lady who wrote the letter had actually MET my son? “Oh no, madam. It’s a statistical exercise.” Ridiculous, and also expensive.