What Questions Should You Ask About Your Child’s Weight, Instead Of Commenting On Size
I was leaning against the brick wall outside my son’s elementary school last week, sipping lukewarm coffee and waiting for dismissal, when I heard my friend Lila laugh and call to her 10-year-old son, Jax. “Easy on the Goldfish, big guy—save some room for dinner, yeah?” Jax grabbed the whole bag and took off running after my kid toward the playground, and Lila turned to me, her smile dropping a little. She’s known I used to work as a school counselor, so she pulled me a few steps away from the other parents and asked the question she’d been turning over for months: I know he’s gained a lot of weight this year, the doctor mentioned it at his checkup, but what do I actually do about it? I don’t want to give him a complex, but I don’t want to just ignore it either.
Lila told me she’d already tried every trick she’d seen online: she swapped soda for sparkling water, started making the whole family take a 30-minute walk after dinner every night, hid chips in the back of the pantry behind the canned beans. But Jax just asks his teammates for extra cookies after soccer practice, sneaks granola bars from the pantry when she’s on work calls, and every meal ends with a quiet standoff over how much he’s eaten. I nodded, and told her my own story to start: when I was 12, my mom started commenting on my “baby fat” before I started junior high swim team. I still remember the day in the grocery store checkout, when I’d thrown a pint of mint chocolate chip in the cart, and she tilted her head and said “Don’t you think that’s a bad idea right before tryouts?” I didn’t eat ice cream in front of another person for 10 years. I still catch myself skipping dessert in front of people even now, 25 years later. So I know first hand how even a well-meaning comment can stick.
I told Lila that instead of commenting on Jax’s weight or listing all the things he’s doing wrong, she should start asking specific, casual questions. It’s a small shift, but it changes the whole dynamic from you being the enforcer to him learning to listen to his own body.
The first question to try, I said, is “How does your body feel after you eat that?” You don’t say it in a snarky “I told you that was junk” tone, just a casual, curious question. Most kids never learn to check in with themselves. They eat what’s in front of them, what their friends are eating, what tastes good, and they don’t stop to notice that a full bag of Goldfish leaves their stomach aching an hour later, or that a candy bar for after-school snack leaves them ravenous by the time soccer practice starts. It’s not about shaming, it’s about helping them build that connection on their own, instead of you policing every bite.
The second question to keep in your back pocket is “Are you actually hungry, or are you bored or thirsty?” Half the time kids wander into the kitchen looking for snacks because they’ve been sitting at a desk all day, or they’re scrolling TikTok and want something to do, not because their body needs food. I started asking this with my own 11-year-old a couple years ago, and nine times out of ten he’ll shrug and say he’s bored, then go shoot hoops in the driveway or build something with Legos instead of grabbing a granola bar. I keep a big reusable water bottle by the front door, too, so if he’s thirsty, he can drink that first before grabbing something to eat.
For movement, instead of saying “we need to go exercise” (which immediately frames moving as a punishment for eating too much), ask “what’s something fun you want to do with your body this week?” Movement gets tied to weight loss so fast that kids stop seeing it as a way to have fun. When you let them pick what they want to do, they might choose biking to the corner store for slushies, or climbing at the park, or playing tag with the neighbor kids, instead of dragging their feet through a mandatory walk around the block.
I also told her to stop hiding treats. If you ban all junk food, kids just learn to sneak it and eat it as fast as they can when they get the chance, instead of stopping when they’re full. A small concrete shift I do at my house is keep cut-up veggies and hummus in the front of the fridge, and a bowl of apples and bananas on the counter, so the easiest snack to grab is something that will fill them up. We still keep chips and cookies in the pantry, out where everyone can reach them, and my kid barely sneaks them anymore because they’re not a forbidden treat.
A week later, Lila texted me. She said she tried the first question that same night, when Jax went back for a second slice of pizza after dinner. Instead of saying “haven’t you had enough?” she just asked how his body felt after the first slice. Jax thought for a second and said “I’m still hungry, but if I eat two I always get a stomach ache before bed.” So he had a banana instead. She said it was the first time in months they didn’t argue about how much he was eating. Last weekend, Jax told her he wanted to go skateboarding at the new park downtown, something he hadn’t done in over a year. He hasn’t lost any weight yet, his jeans still don’t fit the way they did last fall.
I don’t have a neat solution for Lila, or for any other parent asking about their kid’s weight. I still catch myself making offhand comments about my own body in front of my kid sometimes, and I have to stop and correct myself. We’re all working with the stuff we grew up with, the quiet idea that weight equals health, that a smaller body is a better body, that it’s our job as parents to control what our kids eat and how big they are. But what I’ve learned is that commenting on a kid’s size doesn’t change their weight—it just changes how they feel about themselves. Asking questions doesn’t guarantee a certain outcome, but it leaves out the shame, and that’s more than most of us got growing up. It’s messy, it’s slow, and it’s still a work in progress for all of us. But so far, it’s working better than any diet or mandatory walk ever did.
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