Hi friends,
I thought I’d pop on and write about something that I think we all know, but have a hard time putting into practice: We shouldn’t be worrying about our children’s sizes, appetites, growth charts, bodies in general.
I get it. It’s hard. Parents tend to think that our children are walking, talking, parent report cards. Their successes are our successes, and their failures are our failures. They tell everyone if we are good parents or bad parents, and, following that, if we are good people or bad people. If they throw a tantrum in public, our first thought isn’t about their wellbeing, it’s about how embarrassed WE are. There’s a lot to unpack here. Some of this belief is pure garbage – for a lot of reasons, but some of it is valid parental concern. Heck, I began my intuitive eating journey because I knew I had an unhealthy relationship with food, and I didn’t want to unintentionally give that to my son. I wanted to repair my own relationship with food so that I could demonstrate and teach my son to have a healthy relationship with food and his body from day one.
So we should be concerned about our parenting styles, because we WILL impact their body image and their relationship with food, but we shouldn’t be considering their body shape, size, appetite or lack thereof as either a ‘failure’ or a ‘success’. It just is. And if it’s not a success or failure, then it can’t say anything about your success or failure as a parent.
Repeat after me:
My child’s body says nothing about me as a parent.
My child’s body says nothing about me as a parent.
My child’s body says nothing about me as a parent.
Just like large brown furniture and sets of bone china – body image issues are a terrible thing to inherit. Do your kids a favour and get rid of yours before they have to deal with them.
I think secretly we know this deep down, because many of us are victims of this. I know that my mom struggled with this her whole life. She once even told me that she hates when people tease her shih tzu Abby for being fat (she is), because it makes her feel like they are saying my mom (who struggled with her weight her whole life) made her fat.
Growing up I knew I was loved, I was surrounded by good people, and I know they all had the best intentions for me. But I was still subject to nearly constant microaggressions about my weight and size. Comments like “If you could just lose some weight, you’d be a total knockout” and “Don’t eat too many peas and beets – they’re vegetables, but they’re still full of sugar”. Even when they were less explicit, there were implicit messages conveyed. Disapproving faces if I took a big serving, or compliments that I looked amazing when I did succeed at losing weight.
My mothers fear was real, her trauma was generational, and all she wanted for me was to avoid the pain and hurt she had experienced. The problem with that, is that she unwittingly repeated them. Her attempts to protect me were the very attacks that I am recovering from today.
As mothers with body image issues (I could just as easily say, as human women alive in society), we owe it to ourselves and our children to do the ugly work of excising these beliefs so we don’t do this to our own children.
Growth charts are basically meaningless.
Growth charts are ALMOST as garbage as the BMI. I say almost, because I think that growth charts do a better job of identifying potential problems than the BMI does, but only in the hands of a doctor who is asking the right questions, and paying attention to your child as a whole human being. The BMI on the other hand, is straight garbage and should always be disregarded by you and your medical care team. I could go on, but a lot of people more talented than me have already written extensively on this, check some of them out here.
We spend our whole lives accustomed to hearing percentages as grades – 90% is good, 10% is bad. Anything below 50% is failing – that when we begin to hear our child’s growth chart numbers we internalize them as a grade on our parenting. This just isn’t how percentiles work. I don’t know if you recall from math class, but the percentiles are based on a curve. Everything on that curve is totally ‘normal’ – and the closer to 50 you are, the less unique your child is. If your kid is in the 1st percentile or a 99th percentile – they are equally rare. If your child is in the 30th percentile or the 70th percentile – equally rare again. That’s it.
For some reason, North American doctors all use the percentile system, but as you can see in the chart above the WHO uses z-scores (or standardised scores) in their growth charts, which are just another way to talk about how far away from the average a subject is. Instead of percentiles, z-scores talk in standard deviations – and it’s much easier to feel good about a score of 2 or -2 than it is to feel good about being told your son is in the 30th percentile. (For any statisticians in the room, I know that z-scores also use the mean for 0 instead of the median, which is what percentiles use. This all means a lot to statisticians, but is meaningfully the same to us moms).
What the doctors are actually checking for is that your child is staying relatively on their same trajectory. Were they in the 20th percentile for weight when they were born? Were they 20th percentile again at their 3 month appointment? Then they don’t want to see your child in the 1st percentile at their 6 month check up. The 1st percentile isn’t the problem – the 19 percentile drop is. And something changing that drastically might be worth looking into. That’s all. And even then – maybe dropping from the 20th percentile to the 10th percentile is still normal. Likely it will all come out in the wash.
Trust that you know your child best – and fight like hell for their best interests.
My caveat to all of this is that you are still your child’s best advocate when it comes to development and safety. If, knowing everything you know about the growth charts being almost meaningless, and our child’s bodies not indicating anyone’s success or failure, you still have a concern about your child’s growth – deep inside of your mom brain/gut – then pursue that. If your doctors are telling you that a drop or jump on the growth chart is a concern for them, and you know deep in that same mom brain/gut, that everything is fine – then take that concern with a grain of salt.
When my son, Knox, was born, he was in the 30th percentile for weight. I was surprised by this, because I had been 9 lbs 5 ozs at birth, and was expecting to have relatively large babies. But, the doctors assured me that his 7 lbs 2 ozs was perfectly healthy and sent us on our way. Then he dropped to the 20th percentile at his 1 month check up. The doctor assured me that was also normal – some drop off is expected after birth, but he was still gaining weight and staying close to his original trend line. Then, at his 6 month vaccines he had shot up to the 50th percentile. The public health nurses told me this was alarming. They told me to follow up with my family doctor, and to ensure I wasn’t forcing my son to finish his bottles if he wasn’t hungry. They told me that suddenly jumping 20 centiles was too much. Whatever that means.
This was all really triggering for me and my size-centric issues. I thought I had somehow really screwed up my child. That he had been born in a ‘good’ body and 6 months into me caring for him, I had ruined his body. I stressed about what I had done – I was having MAJOR milk supply issues, and was going through quite a lot physically and emotionally trying to make peace with the fact that I had to supplement with formula and take pills just to produce the amount of milk I was producing. Could those pills be the problem? Was I force feeding too much formula? I was freaking out about what I had done to cause his sudden weight gain, and that if I didn’t fix whatever I had broken, he’d be morbidly obese by 1. These were my real thoughts. I really thought that feeding my child a healthy diet of breast milk supplemented with formula had somehow ruined him. (All of this is super fucked up – I hope you’re with me on this).
But when we went back for his 9 month check up with our family doctor, he was still 50th percentile. 50th percentile again at 1 year. The same at 18 months. My new HAES practicing family doctor assured me that what probably happened was that the 30th percentile was actually my child at a lower weight than he was genetically supposed to be (I KNEW IT!) He had gestated in an environment that was malnourished, I was barely eating 200 calories a day, and he was rapidly depleting my fat stores. And then when he was born, there wasn’t much milk available for him. (I will probably write about my breastfeeding journey one day). So he probably stayed small for those first few months as I struggled to produce enough milk by nursing and pumping non-stop. Once I began supplementing with formula, he finally got enough milk for his actual appetite. He bounced up to what was probably his natural weight and plateaued because that is where he should have been all along. The jump from 20th percentile to 50th percentile had actually been a good thing, not alarming at all.
He’s almost 2 now and I trust him to tell me when he’s hungry, or when he’s “nun” (all done). I don’t pressure him to take any more bites, or encourage him to eat any foods he’s not interested in. I occasionally still offer him a glass of whole milk, but it’s up to him if he chugs it or takes two sips and hands it back to me. And guess what? He’s still in the 50th percentile.
Remember how in my last post I encouraged us all to trust our own bodies, and listen to them? Well, let’s give our kids the same courtesy – and allow them to grow up knowing that trusting their bodies is the most natural thing in the world.
I’m writing about this because this evening while out playing with my son in our neighbourhood we ran into some friends of ours. Their son is almost 4 months younger than ours, and we stopped and chatted while our sons shouted “PUPPY!” at our dogs. I noticed that her son, just over 19 months old, was like an inch or two taller than my son – now almost 23 months old. It immediately brought back all these thoughts that my son isn’t growing properly, and it’s probably all my fault. I tried to stop those thoughts pretty quickly – I remembered that freaking out about those things is pointless. Not only can I not change my son’s height now, but worrying about it distracts and upsets me – taking me away from enjoying him in the moment. He will be whatever height he ends up being. He is certainly not done growing, and even if he were done growing – I couldn’t do much about it. All I can do is continue to be his best mom by ensuring he is loved, safe and healthy. In about 6 weeks he’ll go in for his 2 year old check up, and the doctor will take all his measurements. If the doctor is worried about it then, I will do everything possible to provide my son with whatever is in his best interests.
Anyway – Hopefully this one wasn’t too long for you guys – I kept writing it and re-writing it. Probably an indicator that this is stuff I’m still unpacking. Hopefully there’s something here for you to chew on.
Love, Ashleigh
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