What to Do When Your Kid Says You Look Bad Because You’re Fat: Real Parenting Tips
Last Tuesday, I was standing in our steamy bathroom 10 minutes before the school bus, fighting with a pair of jeans I’d bought pre-pandemic. I’d just managed to pull them over my hips and was huffing, trying to hook the top button, when my 9-year-old daughter Mia leaned in the doorway asking for a neon pink hair tie. She glanced at my midsection where the button wouldn’t close, tilted her head, and said it plain: “Mom, you look weird and bad because you’re fat.”
I froze with my fingers on the button, the warm air suddenly thick. I’d spent the last three years quietly working on unlearning my own body shame, but that sentence still landed like a rock in my stomach. For a split second, I wanted to snap at her for being rude, or laugh it off and agree, the way I used to when older family members commented on my weight. But I didn’t. I took a breath, zipped the jeans up as far as they’d go, and said, “That just hurt my feelings. Can we talk about this after school?” She nodded, grabbed a hair tie off the counter, and ran off to catch the bus. I changed into an old pair of sweatpants and stood there for another minute, thinking about how that line didn’t come out of nowhere.
After school, we got cherry popsicles from the freezer and sat on the back steps, and I asked her what made her say that. She didn’t even look guilty, just shrugged and said her friend Lila had talked about her own mom “getting fat” at lunch that week, and all the girls had laughed. Lila said fat people look weird and bad, so it was true, right? That’s when it hit me: she wasn’t being mean. She was just repeating the first clear thing she’d heard about body size from someone her age, and she didn’t know any different.
A lot of parents I know would’ve punished her for being rude, brushed it off, or agreed that yeah, mom needs to lose weight. But I’ve learned that when kids say something this blunt, it’s rarely just a rude comment—it’s an opening to fix the wrong messages they’re picking up everywhere else. The first thing I did was name my feelings honestly, which is something any parent can do, no preparation needed. I didn’t yell, and I didn’t pretend it didn’t hurt. I just told her straight that the message she heard wasn’t true. I patted my belly and said, “This body carries you when you fall off your bike and need a hug, it bakes the brownies you like for your birthday, it walks the dog for a mile every evening with you. My body works really hard for us, and calling it weird or bad isn’t true, and it hurts.”
Then I asked her what else she’d heard about fat people, and we talked about where all those mean messages come from—from social media, from TV shows that only cast skinny people as the heroes, from other kids who’ve heard the same wrong things. I didn’t give a 20-minute lecture. I pulled out my phone, and I showed her the plus-size elementary teacher I follow who posts about hiking with her kids. I showed her a photo of the plus-size nurse who gave us our flu shots last winter, who Mia still talks about for giving her a lollipop after. I pointed out that all different bodies can do all different things, and no size makes someone bad or weird. That took 10 minutes, it didn’t require a big family meeting or any fancy planning.
The biggest change I made after that day, actually, was my own casual talk around my body. I used to mumble about how I need to lose weight when I get dressed in the morning, or complain about my arms in photos when we’re scrolling through family pictures. That’s just habit for a lot of us, right? But I realized that even if I don’t say it about anyone else, saying it about me teaches Mia that being fat is something to be ashamed of. Now, when my jeans don’t fit, I say “These are too small, I need to buy a new pair that fits me better” instead of “I’ve gotten too fat, I need to diet.” When I see a photo of myself and my first instinct is to comment on my size, I just say “We look so happy there” and move on. It’s a small, low-effort change that anyone can start doing today.
It’s not like we fixed all of this in one afternoon. I still struggle with my own body image, and I still slip into old habits sometimes. A week ago, I caught myself frowning at my reflection in a store window, and Mia pointed out that I was doing the thing I said not to do. She was right. Last month, she came home and told me a boy in her class called a heavier classmate fat, and she told him it was a mean thing to say, which made my chest feel tight in a good way. But I’m sure she’ll hear more wrong messages at school or online as she gets older, and I’m sure she’ll say something hurtful again.
I don’t have it all figured out, and I’m not out here winning any parent of the year awards. But what I do know is that shutting the conversation down doesn’t help, and blowing up at a kid for repeating what they heard doesn’t help either. What works, at least for us right now, is being honest about how the comment made me feel, correcting the wrong message simply, and modeling that all bodies deserve respect, no matter what size they are. I don’t know what the next comment will be, or what the next mistake I’ll make will be, but we’re taking it one conversation at a time.
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