Australia primary school blasted for weighing, ranking students in front of peers
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Learning the hard “weigh.”
An Australia primary school is under fire for weighing young students in front of their peers before the kids were publicly ranked based on their number on the scale.
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Butterfly Foundation, an organization that supports those with eating disorders, said it recently received a disturbing message from a concerned parent whose friend’s 10-year-old daughter was weighed during class on a set of scales the teacher brought into the classroom, 7News.com reported.
The students were forced to weigh themselves, write their names and weights on the board, then were ranked from lightest to heaviest.
The friend’s daughter was the heaviest.
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“The problem here has nothing to do with a child’s weight, but rather that children’s weight is being used as a comparative learning tool,” Butterfly Foundation’s Dr. Stephanie Damiano wrote in a letter to teachers, according to the news site.
“In the case of this child, over the following weekend, she didn’t eat in an attempt to no longer be the heaviest child in the class.”
The organization added they are seeing a rising number of younger students, specifically those aged 9 to 12, struggling with body image and problematic behaviour.
“We’re increasingly hearing reports of students expressing low self-esteem, not eating at school or who are uncomfortable doing so in front of others, students over-eating and under-eating and expressing a desire to count calories and diet from a young age,” Damiano said.
The foundation’s head of prevention, Danni Rowlands, said there’s no excuse as “school staff are more aware of students who have body image issues” and those “struggling with eating disorders.”
She added that weighing children in front of each other will likely create more problems than address obesity.
“There are lots of tools a teacher can use (for teaching activities),” Rowland said. “A child’s body is not one of those.”
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