This Mom Refused to Enroll Her Daughter in Nursery School Because of the Teachers’ Bodies

One mom’s account of her experience considering nursery schools for her daughter is going viral this week for a highly controversial reason.

Hilary Freeman, a mom and journalist based in London, shared a story with the Daily Mail about researching school options for her 2-year-old daughter. At first, she said her tour of a particular nursery school was going well as staff members were playing with her daughter and making a great connection. Soon, however, something occurred to Freeman — many of the staff members at the facility were overweight.

Ultimately, this was enough of an issue that Freeman decided not to allow her daughter to enroll at the school.

She cited the way the teacher “moved slowly and breathlessly” as a possible safety hazard, as well as musing that her daughter might learn “unhealthy habits” by being surrounded by overweight adults.

The backlash against Freeman’s Daily Mail piece has been swift, and rightly so. Unfortunately, this is the same tired rhetoric of faux-concern surrounding overweight individuals that we’ve seen over and over again. In the article, Freeman begins with her concerns about the woman’s reflexes — not something that can be visually “read” from someone’s body type, by the way.

She then quickly pivots to her real issue: “What sort of unhealthy habits would she teach my daughter, who would be eating her lunch and tea there each day?” (As if obesity is a condition that can be caught by proximity.) Freeman makes it clear that she believes that this woman, who moments ago was “kind and great with children”, not only should be reduced to her body type alone, but must be. She makes the immediate assumption that this woman’s weight is the result of chronic overeating, something that also cannot be determined by a cursory glance.

This staff member, however, doesn’t get the full brunt of Freeman’s criticism: “Looking around,” she says, “I noticed that she wasn’t the only extremely overweight member of staff. I couldn’t help worrying about the message this was sending to the children in their care: that being very fat is normal and — when children adopt role models so readily — even desirable.”

Freeman ultimately decided against the nursery school in question. “My anxiety about this was the main reason I chose not to send my daughter to that nursery, despite its Ofsted rating of ‘Good’. Instead, she goes to another, where the staff are all a healthy weight.” (It must be noted here that Freeman openly admits to prioritizing the weight of staff members above the quality of education available at the school, somehow still believing she does so for the good of her daughter.) Naturally, Freeman determines what is a “healthy weight” by appearance and nothing else, synonymizing “thin” with “healthy”.

This piece comes at a time when more and more woman around the globe are speaking out about their mistreatment for not fitting inside mainstream body ideals. Just this week, Gabrielle Deydier was featured in The Guardian recounting her experience “being fat in France,” a culture that, in her findings, considers being overweight to be a “grotesque self-inflicted disability”.

Deydier’s story dovetails neatly with Freeman’s. Though Deydier, who has two degrees, passed an interview for the position of teaching assistant with flying colors, the teacher she was set to work under cut her down instantly.

“You’re Gabrielle Deydier,” she said. “I don’t work with fat people.” If Freeman does not believe it’s safe and healthy for children to be around overweight teachers, does she also believe they should not be hired for such a role in the first place? Does she prioritize a thin figure so highly that she believes, as Deydier says is the case in France, that “physical appearance counts for everything, including…employability”?

Furthermore, deciding what is and is not healthy based on looks alone, as Freeman has done throughout this piece, is not only problematic, but can also be dangerous. As our interview earlier this year with disordered eating specialist Bonnie Brennan pointed out, there is no visible “type” for people who suffer from disordered eating. Urging someone who isn’t “slim enough to fit into society’s beauty ideal,” as Freeman put it, to lose weight is not only an intrusion (and an uneducated one at that), but can even be pushing them farther into disordered eating. Similarly, those who Freeman lauds as “healthy” at the other school simply because they’re thin may be anything but.

Put simply: you cannot diagnose someone’s health by looking at them. And Freeman’s assertion that you can is harmful, both to the public at large and to her young daughter, who will doubtlessly absorb this flawed mindset from her mother.

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