Outrage over proposal to weigh school children in the classroom

A major Australian medical organisation has sparked outrage after claiming every schoolchild in the country should be weighed.

The Australian College of Nursing (ACN) advises that children should have immediate access to an accredited school nurse ‘who can provide care and guidance to ensure they maintain a healthy weight’.

Leanne Boyd, interim CEO of ACN, said the percentage of Australian children who are above average weight – currently at 26 per cent – ​​continues to increase.

She said nurses are best positioned to identify children at risk, educate families and combat the stigma surrounding obesity.

“Nurse-led interventions, which have been shown to be effective in a range of settings, offer a flexible and cost-effective solution,” said Professor Boyd.

“Supporting nurses with training, resources and leadership opportunities is critical to maximizing impact in the fight against childhood obesity.”

But Sydney mother Kate McKenna criticised ACN’s view on the issue, telling Daily Mail Australia: ‘What is the relationship between taking a measurement and changing the outcomes?’

‘What is their plan after the measurement? What are they going to do with the data? Do you have to weigh children to know if they are fat?’

In its position paper Working with Children Above a Healthy Weight: Nurse-led interventions, the ACN recommends ‘collecting and discussing data on height and weight for all children’.

They also want nurses to be able to ‘identify children at risk and implement sensitive interventions in a timely manner, aimed at a whole family approach to improve eating and exercise behaviour’.

To achieve this, we need to ensure that “every school-age child has access to a qualified nurse,” Professor Boyd said.

“Weighing a child every day will not make him or her any less fat,” Ms McKenna said.

‘Imagine the poor fat children on the day the nurse comes to the school. The net nurse becomes the fat nurse.’

There was some support for the plan online, with one commenter on X writing that it was the parents’ fault if children were overweight.

“Lazy fat parents produce lazy fat children. To me this is child abuse,” they wrote.

‘We were lean in the 1950s. The future costs to the health care system are immense.’

While experts at ACN support the plan to weigh children in school, other experts disagree.

Dr. Zali Yager of body image advocacy organization The Embrace Collective says weighing children and labeling them as “overweight” can lead to feelings of shame and stigma.

The Australian College of Nursing has recommended that children should have easy access to a registered nurse ‘to provide care and guidance to ensure maintenance of a healthy weight’.

“I support the idea that every child of school age should have access to a qualified nurse, but I suggest that this should be done to support their health and not to focus on their weight,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald.

‘The US is currently in the process of rolling back its widespread BMI (Body Mass Index) screening programs because they were not helpful in changing weight but were very damaging to children’s psychological health.’

She added that weighing children at school can actually have the opposite effect and lead to eating disorders, less exercise and weight gain.

Lisa Chalmers, director of health and wellbeing at Barker College in the northern Sydney suburb of Hornsby, says focusing on a child’s weight can lead to concerns about body image and can leave parents feeling judged.

“There are no scales in our health center (at school),” she said.

“We talk about how students can get the most out of their brains and bodies, and how certain foods make them feel rather than look.

“We don’t focus on appearance.”

According to a report from Obesity Collective earlier this year, the number of Australians with obesity has risen from 3.9 million in 2012 to 6.3 million in 2022.

According to the group, being overweight or obese is linked to dozens of diseases, including 17 types of cancer, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal disorders, type 2 diabetes, dementia, asthma and chronic kidney disease.