Back in elementary school, your teachers didn’t send letters home to give to your parents too often. That was mostly reserved for when you needed permission to go on a field trip, or maybe when you did something naughty, like said a swear word on the playground just to prove you could.

But now schools in North Andover, Mass. have started sending home letters with kids to let their parents know they are overweight, thanks to the Department of Public Health.

According to CNN, children as young as three years old worry about being overweight and recognize “skinny” as being good, and “fat” as bad.

So imagine when a ten-year-old brings home a letter from school that says they’re fat.

These letters are not only harmful to children’s self esteem, but are just wrong.

The biggest trouble with these letters is that kids’ health is being determined based on the Body Mass Index scale.

Truly, the BMI scale is just not good for determining how healthy you are, or even if you are overweight.

First of all, the BMI scale does not take muscle mass into consideration.

The BMI scale is broken into four parts: underweight, normal weight, overweight and obesity. The category you fit into is based upon your weight and height.

This can be problematic and lead to inaccurate results. An athlete, for example, might be labeled as ‘obese’ or ‘overweight’ because their muscle makes them weigh more.

Cam Watson, a ten-year-old who brought home one of those letters in North Andover, is an athlete who plays several different sports and is clearly very athletic. He and his parents told local news station WHDH that they’re upset about the letters.

Secondly, though more importantly, the BMI scale does not measure the size of one’s waist, which is problematic because excess abdominal fat is what many experts, including the CDC agree, is the biggest predictor for obesity related health problems.

Sending home a letter with parents saying “Hey, your kid is overweight or obese” isn’t going to do anything at all to improve their health, even if a more correct way of measuring fat was used.

Here’s the thing. Most parents don’t know anything about nutrition.

I used to work at a daycare, and the size of some of the kids’ lunches was astounding.

One mom with two kids at the daycare, one a two-and-a-half-year-old, the other about four years old, sent the same size lunch with them every day.

A typical lunch included a thermos full of leftover spaghetti and meatballs, a bag of chips, a dish of sliced strawberries or an applesauce, a granola bar, a bottle of Gatorade, fruit snacks and some sort of chocolate.

For a two-and-a-half-year old.

Parents don’t understand portion sizes. Nobody really does these days. And overeating, especially without enough exercise, leads to                              abdominal fat.

Sending home such letters might even be harmful for children.

Sure, some parents might be oblivious and think there’s nothing wrong with their child.

But, if you grew up in a house like mine, weight was a huge issue. I’ve never been thin, and the rest of my immediate family was. If I went clothes shopping with my mom and sister (oh, could anything be worse?), they would pick up clothes in sizes I fit in and laugh at how big they were. Incentive to lose weight, you know.

Growing up, I knew a girl whose foster parents kept a lock on the fridge because they didn’t want her eating  ‘their’ food.

Can you imagine sending a letter that says “your child is obese” to a home like that? That could be a potentially dangerous situation for a child, be it emotionally or physically.

Because here’s the thing. Schools can’t know what measures parents will take when they are told their child is “wrong,” as though being overweight is some sort of naughty behavior.

Instead, why not send out a general letter that says “obesity is on the rise, here’s what you can do about it.” Why not hire a nutritionist to talk
with parents?

There’s two ways to address childhood obesity and not make kids feel guilty about being fat at the same time.

Cam Watson told WHDH that while he knows he’s not really overweight, he’s worried about the letters because some of his friends’ feelings have
been hurt by them.

Because telling a kid they’re fat when all they know about the word fat is that it’s negative is not OK.