The F-Word: The Skinny (and Fat) on Talking to Children About Weight

I don't think I'm a Crazy Mommy when it comes to children and food--in fact, I pretty much stake my reputation on being level-headed on the subject (well, I try)--but even I sometimes get pushed to the brink of a pretty serious rant. My husband happened to mention to a teacher at our daughters' school that we made chocolate cupcakes over the weekend and that he ate most of them. Her response? Looking at my six-year-old for confirmation: "Well, we girls have to watch our figures." Now, she couldn't know that my husband is a psychiatrist who spends all day talking to patients with disordered relationships to food? But she certainly saw a small girl in front of her, and even someone trained as an educator couldn't help herself--she had to say the typically "feminine" thing about watching her weight.

A friend of mine's mother-in-law gifted her grand-daughter with a pair of tight black jeans (who okayed marketing "skinny jeans " to children, anyway?) and the words: "She should really wear these now, to take advantage of that figure." The child's age? Three.

My daughter came home from a sixth-birthday shopping trip bearing a lovely new dress, which, according to her, "Makes me look too skinny! It makes me look like this [holding up her pinky finger]."

Come on, people! How have we not absorbed at this stage how harmful it is for girls, in particular, to be perpetually bombarded with the message that skinny is good and fat is bad? It's like the 1980s and '90s never happened. Can we just try, please, to keep the F-word and the S-word out of the general discourse for a few more years--until they are, say, ten? Is that too much to ask?

Now, I certainly know mothers who go to the opposite extreme; one friend wouldn't read any books to her infant daughter with the word "fat" in them. (I'm not sure whether "thin" came under similar censure....) To me, that seemed excessively P.C., or at least unrealistically over-protective. But at least no one could accuse her of ignoring the potential harm of loaded weight terms.

So can we all agree not to discuss how we need to "lose five" in front of our children? Not to comment on whether they look fat or skinny? To choose clothes for them based on cuteness rather than figure-enhancing qualities? Soon enough our adorable first-graders will be miserable, self-conscious preteens--why speed up the process? It seems especially amazing to me that it's the women in our daughters' lives who are blithely passing on this insane fixation on weight--not men, mind you, who get blamed for so many problems in women's lives. That might be the thing that makes me angriest: shouldn't we mothers and women be the ones who understand all the damage that's been done? Let's protect them. Maybe we cant, or shouldn't, artificially excise weight entirely from our discourse--but at the very least let's refuse to engage our children in the national obsession with talking about weight.