A follow-up to a comment rant...
As I just said over at The New Girl’s blog…screw doctors with their stupid height-weight charts. These charts never made ANYONE happy, nor did they prevent anything bad. Oooh, I’m angry about that. You know what else? You know what other purpose they serve? TO MAKE PARENTS FEEL LIKE CRAP. Yeah, that’s right. Is your child heavier or lighter than the average? Average of WHAT? Average of MY family? Average of all middle-class Southern California kids? What…WHAT? Assholes.
They’d probably say that they’re using the charts to look for danger signs, but you know what? THAT’S TOTAL AND UTTER BULLSHIT. If that were the case, they wouldn’t need to tell you the numbers. They’d just have “watch out for danger” and “not in danger” groups. Your kid could be in one or the other. That would still suck donkey’s balls as a heuristic, but it’d be better than rating your child on a scale of 1-100 where you’re aiming for…what? What the hell are you aiming for? 50? I want my kid to be average? Like other kids? WHAT?
Before I became a mom, I’d refuse to get weighed at the doctor’s thinking, “It may make sense to weigh babies, but it doesn’t make any sense to weigh full-grown women.” But, you know what? It doesn’t even really make sense to weigh babies if they aren’t in danger. I could see how during the newborn period more weighing could help the insecurities of the new parents. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t weigh our newborns.
But when does a person’s weight stop being an interesting number? I think that it’s real fast. I’m going to say 10 months or whenever the kids start insisting on feeding themselves for some of their meals. Whenever they start saying, “I want this…or I don’t want that…” Intuitive eating starts THEN. I need to make myself a mommy mantra (that’s me as a mommy…not ALL mommies, necessarily): Provide healthy foods in abundance and variety. STEP AWAY FROM THE SCALES, LADIES…STEP AWAY FROM THE SCALES.
