6th Graders Monitoring Body Fat and Caloric Intake for School.
There’s learning about healthy eating and exercise and then there’s taking things too far. Especially at that critical age.
This reminds me of a wile back when soemone asked me if I was sheltering my kids. What kinds of horrible things could I not counteract just by being a good parent? Well, this would be a PRIME EXAMPLE. Seriously, I have three girls. They get plenty of this message just in media alone. They don’t need it coming from authority figures during a time in which they are extremely self-consious & impressionable.
(We won’t even mention how girls this age treat each other on top of that.)
It’s hard enough trying to be a good parent at all. I don’t need major components of society “helping” me.
I think that many people do try to “improve” various aspects of their lives, with such things as higher income, better living standards, hottest -latest gadgets, and of course, the perfect body. Of course, all that is what society tells us is the happiest lifestyle that people can possibly achieve.
So of course, we extend that to design the perfect life that our children would have as well. As we pack all that into our lives, and our children’s lives, we fail to notice that we are merely following the narrowly guided track that society has implanted into our minds. An economically sensible guided track to be sure, but what are we potentially sacrificing as living breathing creatures of this wonderful Earth to obtain all those things?
Parents are supposed to give their best for their children, to make the future a better place. Let’s learn from all the mistakes now that we are seeing, and give our children a balanced education to make the choice for themselves. Let’s do our best to give them a fighting chance.
I know what you mean. We homeschooled 4, 2 girls and 2 boys. Only the youngest, now 15, is still going at it. We used to get hit from all sides about “socialization” and “quality of education”, and, and, and… They stopped when their sons and daughters started walking through metal detectors just to get an education.
In jr. high (of all times) our PE teacher made us take the Presidential Physical Fitness tests. Talk about embarrassing. Every girl in our class about died – our PE teacher was a guy (and very cute, in a Magnum PI sort of way) and he took all of our weights and measurements, with the assistance of the school secretary, but still… What a great school memory, huh?
Oh we did that presidential fitness test too and I failed *miserably*. I wonder if Reagan did it the same year I did and if he did any better.
I agree with the fact that tracking body fat and caloric intake isn’t a good thing. However, I am guessing this is done in response to the huge increase in obesity and even type 2 diabetes in children in North America even that age. I think there are better ways to teach that, though. In my opinion, simply teaching avoidance of sugared soft drinks and junk food (not easy when Pepsi sponsors your school and sets sales quotas for how much pop you need to sell to maintain funding), to make healthy choices and to keep active. Instead we make it harder and creepier than it needs to be with calorie counting and BMI.
While I respect your opinion I do not feel that 6th grade is too young to be aware of calorie intake and body fat. You might want to visit your local public middle school and take a head count of how many of our 12 year olds are approaching obesity and will have, if they do not already have, type 2 diabetes.
As an overweight child and adult, I wish someone would have taken the time to educate me at this age, it could have prevented a life time of heartache.
My parents didn’t have the guts to enforce good eating habits. Someone needs to step in and help these kids before it’s too late.
While I can certainly agree that there’s too many seriously overweight children with horrible diets, shaming them in front of the whole class is not the way to go about educating them.
If you follow the original links and the followup, the gym teacher is really going about it all wrong. *That’s* what I have a problem with. The parent in the post has stated there were girls in the class who did *not* have weight or diet issues who are now obsessing over it.
While I do feel for you in that your parents wouldn’t step up and do something for you, I don’t think it’s good for the whole of society to rely even more on teachers to do things that parents should.
And look around my blog a bit – you’ll see I have two teenage daughters, both of different body types, plus I do a lot with local kids. I’m well aware.
Ahhh, the public obesity crisis talking points are out in full force, I see.
Here’s an idea people, if what you know about the “obesity crisis” is from TV news reports featuring video footage of headless fat people walking down the street, you don’t know jack.
And if you want to have even more unhealthy kids, get them obsessed and eating disordered at ages 11 and 12. That’s going to help.
You know, or NOT.
Ugh! A friend had a daughter in SECOND GRADE who developed anorexia. When are people going to catch on? It’s all about common sense and balance.