Last spring, among the usual elementary school reminders about theme weeks and illicit peanut butter snacks (WE ARE A NUT FREE CAMPUS!!) an email popped up that gave me pause. My kindergartner would be weighed in school, it said, and I could click on a link to opt her out.
It gave me the ick. I’d paid attention to young women like Mary Cain and members of college cross-country teams speaking out against weigh-ins and body shaming in sport, and how the practice damaged their mental and physical health. That’s different from a kindergartner stepping on a scale then running back to recess, but I know how little minds absorb everything. I didn’t want my daughter to think her school cared about her weight.
Neither, it turns out, did our home state. In January 2022, California’s Department of Education suspended the body mass index reporting it had required since 1996 as part of a fitness test. (BMI, calculated from height and weight, is often used as a proxy for body fat composition.) The state also axed collecting several movement-based measurements that, along with gender, height, and age, had been used to give…
