My Daughter Has a Weight Issue

For the last few weeks, my daughter’s weight has been a topic of interest in our house. If you think that sounds weird, well, yeah it kind of is. Evie, my six year-old daughter, has been watching her weight on a daily (sometimes multiple times per day) in her efforts to hit her target weight. If you think it sounds weird that a six year-old has a target weight, well, yeah it kind of is. But for pretty good reason, at least for her. She can’t move out of the car seat and into a booster seat until she weighs 40 pounds. It’s been an up-scale battle.

Trying to Get My Daughter to Gain Weight

Evie has always been little. She started as a little baby, stayed a little toddler, and is now a little little girl. Since the day she was born she’s been my Little Peanut. I remember the first time I pointed out to my wife that I could fit her whole butt in one of my hands while I carried her. I still can. She’s healthy, we are assured by her pediatrician every time we ask, and as long as she keeps moving up the growth curve she’s fine. Fifth percentile all the way up the chart. Slow and steady is all well and good, but not when she wants to be in a big girl seat in the car immediately.

I have to admit, I somewhat selfishly want her to be able to sit in a booster seat too. With two of three kids in car seats our options for cars that will fit everybody are limited. Minivan, three row SUV, or full-size truck. I’d love to be able to get into a mid-size hybrid, and also love to be done putting car seats in and out of cars. Have you seen the amount of filth that is inside and under a car seat? Roughly half the food your kid has ever eaten in the car ends up as crumbs in the car seat. God help you if your kid throws up in the car seat. So many crevices.

Anyway, she is really tired of being in a car seat. She sees her little brother in a car seat and her older sister sitting in a booster seat. Guess which one she wants to be like? Too bad for her she is much more similar in size to her four year-old brother. She only weighs about a pound more than he does. He’s a sturdy chap.

For the last few weeks she’s been getting on the scale regularly and checking her growth. For the most part making good progress. She is quite the picky eater, often choosing to eat a plain bowl of Cheerios over whatever we are having for dinner. My wife and I made plain Cheerios the only alternative to what we made if they complain about not liking it. We thought it would motivate the kids to try new foods and eliminate having to make something separate for the kids. All it has done is increase Evie’s Cheerios intake. We also made the rule that you have to eat all your dinner to get dessert. Surely that would make her eat her chicken nuggets, right? Nope. There have been many nights where she’ll watch the rest of us eat dessert while she asks if she can have a carrot.

Well, she must have stung a few good days of eating her dinner (we must have made a lot of mac and cheese that week), because she was right on the cusp. One pound to go. So close she could taste it. And foods she really didn’t like. I also told her that getting strong muscles would help her gain weight too, so she helped me carry firewood around our backyard. And it worked. After spending a Saturday hauling wood and choking down non-cheese based food, when she got on the scale on Sunday she was 40 pounds. I converted her car seat into a booster. She was ecstatic.

The next day I’m walking through the house and I hear crying from the bathroom. Nobody can to me and tattled, so I knew nobody was hurt. I checked to see what it was, and there was Evie, sitting on the floor in tears. In between sobs she let me know that she weighed herself, and she wasn’t 40 pounds anymore. She lost 0.4 pounds. She was devastated and it hit me – have we given our daughter an unhealthy attitude toward her weight?

Hoping to Get My Daughter to be Happy With Her Weight

It is a batter for almost every parent to get their kids to eat. Or at least to eat the foods they should it. But was it wrong for us to connect the need to eat her dinner to her weight? I fear we’ve now permanently connected the dots of eat more, weight more – eat less, weight less. When she is six it is a matter of wanting a new seat in the car, but what is it going to be when she’s sixteen? What goal will she think she can attain, what does she think she’ll achieve by being a certain weight?

She could very well just be naturally small. There isn’t a ton of height or size in the family that she could inherit. I listened to a podcast on a child’s growth and height potential, and according to the calculation they gave, Evie will probably be 5’4″. Of course that assumes proper nutrition, so unless grilled cheese sandwiches suddenly become a well balanced meal, we’ll say 5’2″ is more likely. We’ve tried sneaking veggies into her cheese sandwiches and her cheese quesadillas but she finds them every time and picks them out. We’ve tried supplementing her cheese-based meals with some alternatives like protein shakes. If we know dinner will be something she will will immediately disregard for Cheerios, we’ll give her a protein shake for snack during the day. She thinks is fancy chocolate milk, we know it has healthy stuff in there. It’s the kid equivalent of mixing your dog’s medicine in peanut butter.

If anything, I think she sees being skinny as some kind of special bond that she has in common with me. She definitely got her body type from me. I don’t remember exactly how she phrased it, but the other day she told me that we are both in the Skinny Club (or something like that). She even gave us club member names. She was Sparkle Kitty. I was Jellyfish Head. Sure. But what she doesn’t realize, is that my body size is worked for. I enjoy running and I am all about an overall healthy lifestyle, but I’m also very much about the occasional binge like I’m an unsupervised kid at Camp Hope. I’d rather eat the whole cake and then have to run eight miles to work it off than have just one slice. There is a lot about me to unpack there, but for my daughter, she just knows that dad likes cake, but he isn’t fat.

So what message are we sending? That it is good to be healthy, and healthy means being lean? If so, then why the pressure to gain weight? Are we saying that weight doesn’t matter, as long you’re growing? Then why did we push for and celebrate her hitting the 40 pounds mark? Are we saying not to worry about weight or what you eat, as long as you are happy with yourself? Then why put such an emphasis on eating? I feel like there is no right answer here, but if a weight fluctuation of less than an half pound can reduce my daughter to tears, there are probably some wrongs answers.

I think we will still encourage her, and all our kids, to eat their dinner under threat of dry Cheerios and no dessert, but out of the need for overall health. Not for weight. I also think we should stop pointing out that she is essentially the same size as her little brother. It is never a great idea to compare your kids, especially with something like body shape and sizes. She’s petite, he’s stout, they are both cute. I will for sure try to put the 40 pound gorilla behind us. She cleared it once, she achieved her booster seat goal, and now I’ll hide the scale. At least from her, I still need to weight myself everyday. Gotta make sure that extra dessert I eat after the kids go to sleep isn’t sticking to me. Do as I say, right?