Originally Posted by
Mark E. Hurling
I think I can answer this in part jon, but I'll just say up front that some of my comments and advice are heavily freighted with some deeply abiding personal matters that color what I have to say. I highly encourage Gwynn and spar to chime in on this if they would. One because of Gwynn's own experience in being tall and spar's better grasp of the less conservative currents than I have. I happen to think I'm tuned in to this pretty well, but I'm also smart enough to know that I'm not always right.
OK then, part one - tall girls. We knew our daughter was going to be tall early on. She was in the 95th percentile of growth from the beginning and was 3 feet tall before age 2. The rule of thumb among pediatricians is that you reach about half your adult height by that age. So since I'm 5'11" and she got the Hurling DNA big time we figured anywhere from 5'10" to 6'. She looked exactly like my middle sister who also got the Hurling DNA overwhelmingly as well. In fact she looked more like my sister's daughter than Dearly Beloved's daughter.
So we prepared her early for the probability that she would tower over the others in her classes. Which she did. She never came home upset from teasing over it though, and I don't know if that meant it didn't happen or that she didn't care about it. We worked on self esteem thinking and body image so that she would feel comfortable being who she was and how she was. I know this may sound utterly unlike me and most of the things I say and do here, but some aspects of the liberal ideas of self esteem have some merit. I know I grew up hating myself for being a fat kid and I was teased about it mercilessly. Dearly Beloved, being half Polish and half Swedish is pretty dark skinned. She got it bad as a kid too being called the N word during the summers when she'd get really dark. Given our own experiences we wanted to armor her up in case she got some of the same treatment. It seemed to work.
Now for the part where I go to the dark side. In conjunction with this, Dearly Beloved and I got into some bad habits in child rearing. We both had full time jobs until our daughter was in high school. So the golden arches for a quick drive through became convenient when taking her to day care and later kindergarten. Then in grades 1-5 we discovered that the kids had very little time for lunch and so would stuff their food down fast. More bad eating habits. About age 8 or so, we were appalled when she face planted herself at an Italian restaurant into the tomato salad and gobbled it. Nothing we did could get her eating back on track and we were stuck with a dilemma between trying shame to get her to eat more rationally or starving her. So I resorted to near dragging her to the gym to get her to exercise. Yeah, that went well. I should have remembered my own experience with The Old Man when he expressed less than favorable opinions over my own physical prowess. But then I wasn't prepared to put her through boot camp like I got from him.
The down side of the self esteem movement has morphed in the US and from what our daughter tells us in the UK as well to fat acceptance. She was even a spokesperson and activist for it in college. They have all manner of studies and rationalizations for their fatness and too bad if you try talking them out of it. Ain't gonna happen. So we gave up about her senior year in high school. She has to find the will and desire to this for herself and that's that.
So I can only say in conclusion that you have to be alert to what you are doing and what they are doing and try to head off any bad direction earlier rather than later.