What To Do When Your Kid Says You Look Weird Or Bad Because You’re Fat: Real Parenting Tips
Last Saturday, my 7-year-old daughter dragged my old prom dress out of the back of the hall closet to play princess. I’d kept it for 15 years for no real reason, just never gotten around to donating it, and when she begged me to try it on, I shrugged and said sure. I zipped it up halfway, turned to show her, and she blinked and said, “Mom, you look weird and bad. It’s ‘cause you’re fat now.”
I stood there for a second, the plastic zipper digging into my ribs, that familiar tight twist low in my stomach. I didn’t cry, didn’t yell, just unzipped the dress slowly, pulled my old gray sweatpants and faded band tee back on. I hung the dress back up and told her she could wear it as a princess cape if she wanted, which brightened her right up. We made microwave popcorn after that and turned on the Bluey rerun she’d been begging to watch, but the comment looped in my head all afternoon.
I’d thought a lot before about what I’d do if my kid ever said something like that. I’d pictured giving a rousing speech, or pulling up a bunch of pictures of plus-size activists to show her all bodies are good bodies. But when it actually happened, all I could think about was how she’d picked that line up. When I asked her later where she’d heard talking like that, she shrugged and said Lila’s mom said it at their pool party two weeks before. Lila’s mom had looked at a picture someone took and said, “Ugh, I look so bad here, I got so fat.” My daughter just connected the dots: when clothes don’t fit, and you don’t look like the old picture, you say you look bad ‘cause you’re fat. That’s just what adults do.
That’s the first thing I realized that most people don’t talk about: when little kids say this, they’re almost never being intentionally cruel. They’re 6, 7, 8 years old, still learning how language works, still parroting what they hear the adults around them say. They don’t have the nuance to understand that the comment carries all this cultural baggage about body shame, all this hurt that’s built up over years of people talking about fat like it’s the worst thing you can be.
What I did next wasn’t a big speech. After the show ended, I sat down next to her on the couch and said, “It hurt my feelings when you said I look weird and bad ‘cause I’m fat. When people talk that way about bodies, it makes almost everyone feel bad, and that includes me.” That’s it—no yelling, no over-explaining, no making her feel like a terrible person for being honest. She immediately teared up and said she didn’t mean to hurt me, which I believed. I hugged her and said I knew, that’s why I was telling her, so she knows for next time.
Then we talked simply about what words mean, while we folded the laundry that had been sitting in the basket for three days. I said, “Fat just means a body that takes up more space than another body. Some people are fat, some people are skinny, some are in between. All of those are just bodies. Calling someone fat to say they look bad is like calling someone tall to say they’re weird—it’s not true, it just hurts people.” That’s simple enough for a 7-year-old to understand, no big jargon, no overcomplicating it.
After that, I started noticing all the little ways I’d been parroting the same body shame I didn’t want her to learn. I’d stand in front of the mirror in the morning pulling at my jeans and mumble, “Ugh, I look so fat in these.” I’d turn down going to the pool because I didn’t want to wear a swimsuit in front of people. All of that was just as loud as any comment my daughter made, and she was picking up on it. So I made a couple of small, specific changes that anyone can do: First, when I talk about clothes that don’t fit, I don’t tie it to my body being bad. If my jeans are tight, I say “These got uncomfortable after I washed them” instead of “These make me look fat.” Second, I unfollowed the handful of weight loss and diet accounts I’d been following mindlessly on Instagram, so I don’t scroll through that content when my daughter’s sitting next to me. Third, if I do slip up and say something out loud, I correct myself right in front of her, so she sees that learning to talk differently is something we all do.
A week after the prom dress incident, we were in the grocery store checkout line, and a plus-size woman was in front of us buying popsicles. My daughter said loud enough for the woman to hear, “Mom, that lady’s fat!” I didn’t yank her arm and shush her like I would have before, which just makes kids think fat is a bad dirty word you can’t talk about. I just smiled at the woman, waited until we’d walked away to the car, then said, “Yeah, that’s just her body. Remember we talked about how saying that out loud about someone can hurt their feelings, even if you don’t mean it?” She nodded, and that was that, no big scene.
It’s not like we’ve fixed body shame forever. Last night, after we ate too much takeout pizza, I caught myself rubbing my stomach and sighing about feeling bloated, and I had to stop mid-sentence. I still have days where I feel bad about my body, and I don’t pretend I don’t. What’s changed is that I’m not passing that shame onto her directly, one comment at a time. Some days we get it right, some days I slip up. That’s just how it goes. I don’t need a perfect resolution. I just need to keep doing the small, everyday stuff that teaches her bodies are just bodies, no matter what size they are.
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