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Fourth grade. It was 1972 and I was nine years old. I went to school at Alice Birney Elementary School, in Charleston Heights, SC. It was the year my education became an experiment. It was the year I discovered boys (and girls.) It was the year I discovered junk food. It was the year that I discovered Teen Beat, Tiger Beat, and Seventeen Magazine. It was the year everything changed.
In fourth grade, my little southern school adopted the educational practice known as Individually Guided Education (IGE for short.) There were no letter grades, instead we received pieces of paper marked "All of the time", "Most of the time", "Some of the time", and "Seldom". My class was made up of a group of children in fourth grade, fifth grade, and sixth grade with the idea that students in all of those grade levels could work at the level that best suited them. I thought it was brilliant and while I was still occasionally bored and drove my Spelling teacher insane because she had nothing to offer me above the sixth grade level, what I liked most was that my friends were the more mature kids and not the same old kids I'd been in class with for years.
My best friends became the sixth graders and they opened my eyes to a whole new world.
Instead of spending my after school hours and weekends building forts in the woods or playing street hockey with the younger neighborhood kids, I was just hanging out with the older girls.
We read teen magazines. We talked about boys (and I quietly thought about girls.) I was introduced to the joys of junk food.
We would pool our money, head off on our bikes to the Red & White in front of our subdivision and buy bags of Doritos and bean dip. This is when my affinity for cream horns began - we ate them by the dozen, literally.
I never thought about going on a diet. I didn't worry that I was too fat. But my friends the older girls, many of whom had older sisters (I was the oldest child in my family), did think about diet. They would devour Doritos and cream horns and sodas and then talk about how fat they felt. I would nod my head and laugh or moan but I didn't really get it. It didn't make sense. They were all bigger than I was but they weren't fat, they were just older and thus bigger. Whatever. I went with it because that's what they did.
When Suzanne told me last week about being interviewed in the fourth grade about fat, I wondered what I would have said had I been asked those questions. Would I have played the part and said yes I was dieting? Or talk badly about my body? Or would I have just shrugged and said that some girls I knew were on a diet but I didn't get it? I don't honestly know what I'd have said, but I do know I wasn't on a diet and I didn't feel fat.
Flash forward to 1992 and my oldest daughter was in the fourth grade. She wasn't fat but she thought about fat, as did all of the girls she was friends with. She wasn't on a diet but she knew what dieting was because that's one of the things she and her friends talked about. Not a lot, but it was definitely a topic for discussion. It didn't matter how often I told her and her friends that they weren't fat, their legs were fine, their butts were not too big and they did not need to lose weight - they never really believed me. I was just a mom. A mom they liked but still, just a mom. They preferred to believe the messages they sent to each other and the messages sent to them by boys and by the media that surrounded them.
Flash forward again, this time to 2005, another daughter, another fourth grader. The diet and weight loss and negative body image discussions were constant. RJ was not fat but she was big. She's always been big. She was tall. She was muscular. She swam hours and hours every week on a synchronized swimming team. And yes, she loved food but she did not need to diet or lose weight.
Fourth graders should not be focused on weight loss. On diet. On food. On how attractive they are to their peers.
