Last week, I was at the public library with my kids. Sometimes they like to do their homework there, rather than at the kitchen table, for a change of pace. To keep myself amused as Ian worked on math problems, I picked up the library's copy of Vogue. The article about a mom who put her seven year old daughter on a diet completely freaked me out.
The article isn't online, but you can read big chunks of it at New York magazine and at Jezebel.
The mom, a New York City super rich lady, was horrified and disgusted by her daughter's huge appetite and obese frame. She puts her daughter on a diet and the kid loses weight in time for a Vogue photo shoot.
I suppose that it's a good thing to care about kids' health and eating habits. Michelle Obama has made childhood obesity a big part of her food campaign, but this woman's approach to her daughter's weight was repellent. The woman clearly had food issues of her own and she handed down those issues to her like grandma's wedding china. Her daughter complained about being hungry. She taught her daughter that being hungry is important, so you can look good in clothes. Being slim wasn't about being healthy; it was about being pretty. The mom shamed the girl into losing weight.
I can guess how that little girl became overweight. Snacks and no exercise. Lots of trips to Starbucks for treats. Kids are naturally thin and common sense will keep them there.
Kids need exercise every day. I bet this girl goes to a fancy prep school in the city, where they don't have a proper playground or recess period. So, the mom needs to take her to Central Park every single day. She needs to take the bike down the elevator and ride to the park. The mom or the nanny needs to get on a bike, too, because if kids don't see you exercising, they won't do it. If it's too cold to go to the park, then they need to sign up for gymnastics or basketball and run around.
Healthy foods. Don't keep muffins and chips in the house. Don't offer dessert after every meal. Put a serving of meat and vegetables on their plate, even if they are picky. Don't drink juice with meals. Don't eat out too many times. Make her lunch every day, rather than letting her eat the crap that serve in cafeterias. It's really just common sense.
This mom handles her daughter's weight problem, not by getting her outside or by eating healthy foods at home. She handles it by shaming the kid, which is setting her up for a lifetime of yo-yo dieting and dangerous food disorders.
Apt. 11d 
“Kids are naturally thin…”
Nope. Some are, some aren’t. (I’ve got one kid who is solid muscle, and an other who tends a bit toward pudge. Same exact household.)
Energy levels are very different from individual to individual, which is a related issue.
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Or look at the Obamas–she rather obviously has to work pretty hard on her weight, while he doesn’t (although smoking probably helps a lot).
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Actually, fancy prep schools in the city have very nice gym/playground facilities, and generally place a great emphasis on athletics, which are mandatory or quasi-mandatory at many schools. They also take kids to the park if they don’t have the facilities at the school; almost all the prep schools are within a couple of blocks of Riverside, Central Park, or Prospect Park, or they have large campuses in the Bronx or Brooklyn.
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. . . and, based on my experience at one of those schools, this little girl is going to have an awesome eating disorder by sophomore year
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“Kids are naturally thin…” just isn’t really true.
There are lots and lots of chubby children at the girls school who have upper middle upbringings, live in a walkable neighborhood and have skinny siblings/parents. One mom in particular is a huge fitness person and her daughter is significantly overweight. I think the mom is blind to it as the kid is squeezed into designer clothes that are at least 1 size to small. (think 5 year old needs size 7 not 5).
In an age where I don’t think I know a single friend who doesn’t have a weight hang up, this article feels like a throw back to the 80s. I wonder if in 15 years they will have an expose with the daughter.
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Smoking helps everything alot, except for the things it doesn’t help. It took four deaths among my close relative for me to quit.
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“Actually, fancy prep schools in the city have very nice gym/playground facilities, and generally place a great emphasis on athletics, which are mandatory or quasi-mandatory at many schools.”
I wondered about that. Parents don’t send kids to those schools wanting to get back tubby little geniuses.
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I think it’s interesting that discussing the vogue article seems to turn to discussing weight issues with children and women, than with the article.
I think that part of what makes the issue difficult is trying to balance the social (beauty) and health reasons for being thin and thinner. It’s a tough balance to teach a child who tends towards overweight to be healthier (which means loosing weight) without reinforcing the messages to be thin for the sake beauty.
I read the quotes from the vogue article thinking that it might be a brutally honest piece of self reflection about how mothers visit our own issues — a mother lit genre. But I’m guessing from commentary that it was just clueless?
In my kiddos school, I think there are fewer than 10/400 kids who might be classified as pudgy (which I’ll try to guess as being clinically obese — though since I’m not weighing and measuring everyone, I am merely guessing).
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Obesity is a problem closely linked with poverty so it’s unlikely that this child’s weight problem- if one even exists- is indicative of something structurally wrong with in the lives’ of New York’s super rich.
And, no, kids aren’t just naturally thin. Not always so, at least. There’s a big variation in “natural” weight set points and the spectrum includes kids that we would label overweight. I’d be willing to accept that at some point on the end of the weight spectrum there are people for whom it is not natural and there is an underlying physical or environmental problem causing their weight to be too high but that doesn’t mean that every person who is overweight is only that way because of eating too much and a lack of exercise.
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I was just so grossed out by the comment that the woman went through the little girl’s childhood being relieved that the kid didn’t have any issues — like colic, ADD or autism — that I had a hard time reading anything past that. Clearly, in her mind there are acceptable and unacceptable kids and I wonder what she would have done if she’d been given mine.
(I also have a friend whose daughter is adopted from Eastern Europe, and the child was literally thrown away in the trash, presumably for having a birth defect. I found myself picturing this mom as the type that would do that.)
Regardless of how she feels about the kid’s weight, the real issue is that she’s a terrible mother if she treats the kid like some kind of consumer good she ordered out of a catalog that unfortunately you can’t return if it doesn’t end up looking good on you. (“I’d like a refund. This one’s a lesbian. That’s now what I ordered.”)That girl is in for a world of hurt —
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If you read the article, the mother attributes the taking of action on the part of her daughter’s obesity (the child weighed 93 pounds at age 7 and was wearing size 8 jeans at age 4) to the pediatrician, who encouraged intervention at age 6, then had to again at the 7 year check-up because the mother hadn’t taken any real steps toward addressing the problem.
She wasn’t disgusted or horrified by her daughter’s weight. Though she doesn’t come across in the article as a woman I’d love to be friends with, the vilifying of this mother smacks of the nasty judgements mothers make about each other’s parenting at PTA meetings.
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I don’t know about pediatricians, but my doctor keeps telling me to get exercise and lose weight. I’ve complied with 50% of that.
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I haven’t read the article, but I have to mention that unfortunately, most kids aren’t going to buy the “health” argument. They’re not 50-year-olds with bad knees and heart trouble–“health” means nothing to them. With a kid who is in normal range, you can probably manage them stealthily with the methods Laura mentions, but if a kid is fat already, I don’t think that’s going to work in most cases.
I was having a really hard time managing my pudgy child’s raging sweet tooth a couple years back, and I’m afraid what finally did the job was some brutal frankness along the lines of “If you eat that, you’re going to get fat”. The thing is–kids don’t know that. They don’t see any connection between sweets and getting fat, and some of them do have to be told explicitly, even if it’s not PC.
Fortunately, I haven’t had to repeat that conversation. The kids have pretty much internalized the idea that they are limited to two sweets a day. (That sounds like a lot, but if you count up, I think you’ll find that that’s actually rather restrictive compared to unfettered grazing.) We do wind up having a lot of Talmudic discussions on the question of what is and isn’t a sweet, but they are pretty conscientious about reporting cupcakes, cookie cakes, and donuts that happened at school.
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I try to follow the same “two sweets” policy myself and it really does seem to be the right level for weight maintenance for me (a Starbucks mocha would count as one).
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We do wind up having a lot of Talmudic discussions on the question of what is and isn’t a sweet…
That’s me this Lent. I’ve decided that some of the more absurd muffins are actually sweets.
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Anything with an added sugar is a sweet so all muffins are sweets. Plus, all of that grain, so you might as well just eat a few spoonfuls of honey.
My kids eat an unbelievable amount of carbs. They don’t overeat so it’s not a weight problem but I have a hard time getting them to eat low carb things. Even the healthy things they eat, fruits mostly, are high in carbs. I’ve decided to ignore it for the time being and hope they grow to like vegetables eventually.
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At Medium Raggirl’s 7-year annual physical last year, we were shocked that the doctor told us (with her in the room) that she had to “watch her weight.” Medium Raggirl is not chubby. She is lean and probably on the muscular side. But the doctor showed us her chart, that had MR directly on the target height/weight line for a six year old, and then 5-10 pounds over the line for a seven year old. (When the girls are growing so fast, there’s no way to know whether a 10 pound weight gain in “proportional” or not.) As we walked out of the doctor’s office, I suddenly thought about the huge breakfast I had just taken her to before the appointment.
This year, before her 8-year physical, I intentionally scheduled it for the morning, and then said, “Oops, we don’t have time for breakfast, I’ll take you out somewhere good afterwards!” She was back on the target weight line.
————-
In our school, all except for one or two kids per grade are on the skinny side. In other nearby schools, it is almost exactly the opposite, with all except one of two kids being pudgy.
There’s nothing “natural” about it, either way. Calories taken in versus energy expended.
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“Anything with an added sugar is a sweet so all muffins are sweets. Plus, all of that grain, so you might as well just eat a few spoonfuls of honey.”
If you think too hard about this stuff, you’ll go bonkers.
“My kids eat an unbelievable amount of carbs. They don’t overeat so it’s not a weight problem but I have a hard time getting them to eat low carb things.”
I suspect there may be something developmental about kids’ preference for carbohydrates. The pasta-only kid is a very common critter.
I try to keep nuts on hand to avoid 100% carb snacking.
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As we walked out of the doctor’s office, I suddenly thought about the huge breakfast I had just taken her to before the appointment.
I get that sometimes when I burp. It is really getting a second chance to enjoy a meal.
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I just looked at the CDC map and it struck me how much obesity has increased in the last 10 years and it’s huge.
http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html
True, as with autism, we don’t have good records of the past, and anecdotal stories of what we remember from our childhoods are probably inaccurate and might involve mis-reporting, so we have to take the data with some salt.
It’s the activity end of the spectrum that strikes me as being a significant cause of the increase in obesity. It could be true that kids are eating worse, too, with more prepared foods, but I think the screen time, at earlier and earlier ages is having a massive effect (looking at the graph).
We have one kid who is in perpetual motion (and, really, only sits still to use a DS, which he is permitted to do rarely, or read, which he does every day, but needs to be reminded except when he’s falling asleep). But, he might be a lot less active if he had unfettered access to the DS. The discussion on obesity makes me remember to remain unfazed by protests of our fairly extreme restrictions on video game use.
I’m coming to think that video games are bad for your health (impulse control, attention, movement), though, as my kid said, I need better data to prove my point. We need interventionist studies, where one group of kids is allowed to play more video games than the other (random assignment) — the epidemiology isn’t good enough. Would you let your children be randomly assigned to a video game/non video game group? I think I might, for the sake of science, for a period of < 1 year.
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“At Medium Raggirl’s 7-year annual physical last year, we were shocked that the doctor told us (with her in the room) that she had to “watch her weight.” Medium Raggirl is not chubby. She is lean and probably on the muscular side.”
I had a very similar doctor’s apt. this past summer. I’ve told the story here recently, but to recap, the doctor told me to worry about my lean, muscular child’s weight while not noticing that his older sister is pudgy with low muscle tone (but right at 50% on the chart–probably thanks to that same lack of muscle tissue). The doctor was looking at the chart, not the children.
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We do wind up having a lot of Talmudic discussions on the question of what is and isn’t a sweet…
See, your problem is taking the Talmudic approach without sufficient training in the Yeshiva.
You should switch to the Jesuitical approach, where you say, “I am only eating this blueberry muffin because blueberries are healthy, and I need fruits and vegetables in my diet. The fat and sugar is only incidental to my goal of obtaining the blueberries.”
I believe that if you can direct your mind solely to the nutritional content of the blueberries, that the fat content of the rest of the muffin won’t actually count against you.
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“See, your problem is taking the Talmudic approach without sufficient training in the Yeshiva.”
The kids are really developing my mind. The oldest, in particular, is a natural dinner table lawyer.
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A piece of advice I’ve received from several parents of teen boys is to not get a gaming system. Neither I nor my spouse are into video games so it’s not a temptation for us but I think it’s something we’ll avoid for our boy’s sake. That said, I remember playing Legend of Zelda on the 8 bit Nintendo for days at a time and I turned out fine (mostly).
My mom also bought terrible food and now I’m a very healthy eater. Remember those little grenades of punch that were basically water, sugar, and dye? I lived on those in the summer as a kid.
Also, piece of bologna and american cheese heated up in the microwave until the edge got nice and crispy.
I know what we’re having for dinner tonight!
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“boys’ sake” of course
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And by of course I mean “boys’ sakes”
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I just learned that there are at least 400 genes connected with weight, and that kind of balancing act means a lot of variation of “normal”. I’m not making excuses for myself, because I can definitely point to bad choices as part of the making of the big and beautiful me, but I am less inclined to make judgments about others than I used to be. (And I have always been the “still has the baby fat”, “pudgy”, etc. one of the siblings, the other two are and always have been “naturally” thin.)
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I like Laura’s stealth methods as well. Putting aside genetics, it’s also a family issue – if the parents are active, the kids will be active, similar to if the kids see the parents reading, the kids will read.
I am lucky because I have a six year old who is active/full of energy by nature and up for anything. So it’s much much easier to incorporate activity. We also live a 20 minute walk from her school so she walks 40 minutes a day. Add in three recesses a day, three gym classes a week at school and two karate classes a week and you have a lot of physical activity.
At 6 she has friends who already say “I don’t like to sweat”…
Net net, I look at being active as having the same importance as eating well/sleeping well/academics/arts – they are all critical to a growing kid.
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I think one important factor is how very slow the process of breaking down food resistance/limiting intake is. It takes enormous persistence and consistency on the part of the parents. A couple days ago, we were at Pei Wei and my 9-year-old was asking for the tofu from my pad Thai. Just a year earlier, she and her brother were picking at their homemade tofu stir fry and wondering aloud where the chicken was. I did not expect to win a convert to tofu. In fact, to tell the truth, I’m not wild about it myself (it’s cheap, though).
I think you can bring Annette Lareau into this. “Concerted cultivation” means you keep offering unloved veggies and limiting intake while in our abundant society, “natural growth” means (potentially) winding up with a 93-pound 7-year-old.
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I wonder if in 15 years they will have an expose with the daughter.
I think typically magazines only plan issues up to a year in advance.
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I’m generally in the “genetics” camp. Since I am down 25 pounds since Thanksgiving, weight is now a product of pure grit and determination and personal value. I’m sure I’ll be back in the “genetic” camp soon enough.
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My resting (but after four cups of coffee) pulse rate is 55 bpm. I’m going to hope that’s enough to keep the Lipitor fairy away for another year.
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“Since I am down 25 pounds since Thanksgiving…”
Losing weight over the holidays? That is weird.
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i gained a ton of weight over the winter, because I was drinking too much red wine. The best thing about cooking is that it is socially acceptable to drink while you do it. I did a lot of cooking. Sigh.
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Losing weight over the holidays? That is weird.
We went to Disney World this first week of December, and while we certainly didn’t eat healthy, we ended up skipping meals left and right, so I came home with a head start.
Then, there was no big Christmas meal because Christmas for my people means good seats to Broadway shows (Wicked!) and Chinese food.
The next big family meal is coming up in less than two weeks (Passover), but the big concern there is less weight gain and more constipation.
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I think the problem with the mother’s diet is it was totally schizophrenic and basically training her daughter to have some sort of bingeing disorder. Some days the mom would let her eat lots of junk, other days nothing “unhealthy” (as arbitrarily decided by the mom). She’d make her daughter go hungry by not allowing her to eat dinner if she ate too much at lunch (which is a big no-no for brain development), plus it’s counterproductive for losing weight. She also publicly humiliated her daughter, meaning there is no way this girl won’t have some messed up emotional attachments to food which will preclude ever eating normally without significant therapy.
This article made me want to call my mother and thank her for teaching me how to have a healthy attitude towards food, particularly by not attaching any moral weight to eating. Vegetables were better than cake because they were more filled with vitamins, not because one was ‘bad’ or would make you fat, and almost anything was fine, as long as the unhealthy stuff was eaten less than the healthy stuff. I managed to get through a few pudgy puberty stages and a high school and college where most girls had an eating disorder totally unscathed because I didn’t tie eating to emotions. I have a ravenous sweet tooth that I try to keep watch on, but it’s more about health and not feeling sluggish rather than weight. It’s not even like my family has a healthy attitude towards size (my grandmothers are the sorts of people who think runway models are on the pudgy side, and my mother definitely monitors my sister’s and my weight and makes unflattering remarks if she thinks we’re too fat), but somehow the healthy eating message prevented the neurosis about weight from sticking and let us actually enjoy food.
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You can easily overeat with Chinese food. Start with dumplings if you have trouble.
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there is no way this girl won’t have some messed up emotional attachments to food which will preclude ever eating normally without significant therapy.
Therapy is what the UMC has instead of ketchup.
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“Then, there was no big Christmas meal because Christmas for my people means good seats to Broadway shows (Wicked!) and Chinese food.”
Christmas Day itself doesn’t really move the needle. The problem is the constant round of parties, cookies and gifted sweets between Thanksgiving and Jan. 1, especially when combined with winter inactivity. It wasn’t a single day of cooking that made Laura a bigger blogger (hopefully that’s temporary).
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“I think the problem with the mother’s diet is it was totally schizophrenic and basically training her daughter to have some sort of bingeing disorder.”
Yeah, that’s why I thought it might be a brutally honest mea culpa, rather than clueless diet advice. The description in the quotes really does seem along the lines of “I played with her head until she couldn’t think straight about food.”
I actually think it’s fairly important to not dismiss obesity in children (not necessarily to listen to the doctors when they’re clueless, but to check the data on weight and pay attention to children’s weight). It’s tough to do in this self esteem culture, and you run the real risk about obsessing about something that is difficult for the child (and provoking eating disorders). But, keeping your weight in check seems like reading. You can’t give up just ’cause it’s difficult for a particular child. You just have to try to do it right as much as you can.
(Cooking classes are all the rage in our neck of the woods, on the grounds that kids will eat more adventurously if they get to cook what they eat).
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I don’t know the full story about this mother, so could someone tell me how is what she did different than “making better, healthier choices” for her daughter? Was she starving her? Or is it more that she is so open about it, exposing her to the public as “my used-to-be-fat kid”?
I have a 2 and 4 year old and there are weight problems/ diabetes in our extended family. I’ve already made choices like giving them reduced fat cheese sticks (maybe 3/4 the fat of a regular cheddar stick), and only allowing 2 sugary sweets a day. We’ll share some fries twice a month, and have two spoons of ice cream every day in the summer… I suppose I could cut back on those things if they developed an unhealthy weight, no matter what age… Besides ensuring that they are active, what else is there to do?
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This is going to sound really shallow but based on the buildup about how she was kind of obsessed with her own weight, I thought she would end up being one of those really stunningly beautiful willowy model types. If she was basically interested in having the child be thin so that she would be powerful in the world and be able to make her own decisions, I didn’t think they would be so, well, ordinary looking. I was expecting a family where everyone looked like Angelina Jolie or something. I guess I thought that someone who was obsessed with looks and body issues would end up being one of those high maintenance women who stopped traffic.
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Kids are naturally thin and common sense will keep them there.
NO. Kids vary. That’s why there’s a growth curve.
The vogue writer? Well, with no interventions her child remains on her previous trajectory, and everyone assumes it’s the mother’s fault. With strenuous, prolonged intervention, the child attains a normal weight, and everyone points fingers at the mother “who’s handed her daughter a bad relationship with food.” Lose/lose, for the mother, no matter which way you slice it. She will be judged by her child, forever. (No mention of the dad, by the way. I guess he gets a free pass on child weight issues?)
Kids vary in their build, energy level, and food preferences. There is no standard-issue kid. From the excerpts, many of the problems arose when others were feeding her kid. People assume a fat kid likes food. They offer more. They offer “fun” food–notice how many of the instances cited were high-calorie, fattening things such as cakes, cookies and hot chocolate.
It would be an interesting experiment. I bet that adults will offer a fat kid more food than a thin kid. They’ll assume the parents are overfeeding her (with no evidence.)
The charts also don’t reflect the current distribution of height and weight. One of my children is perfectly in proportion, i.e. lands in the same percentile (in the 70s) on the height/weight charts for his age. He is skinny. Very few off-the-rack retailers offer such a small waist and long legs. You would not look at him, and say, “Oh, he’s actually heavier and taller than average.” (For those who need such things, I recommend J. Crew and the Gap for pants which fit. Usually, the pants are available online, not in stores, although our local Gap sometimes has a few.)
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“Kids vary in their build, energy level, and food preferences. There is no standard-issue kid. From the excerpts, many of the problems arose when others were feeding her kid. People assume a fat kid likes food. They offer more. They offer “fun” food–notice how many of the instances cited were high-calorie, fattening things such as cakes, cookies and hot chocolate.”
That sounds right.
And exercise can be equally a vicious circle–the less good a child is at it, the less they’ll do. Around 1st grade, my daughter stopped wanting to play running games during recess, because she realized that she was losing every time. The worse she was at running, the less she wanted to run, the worse she was at running, etc. We eventually put her in about six months physical therapy to work on balance and stamina, which improved things. (I have to mention that the reinforcement technique used at the therapy place was to load her up with mini-bags of candy.) She wasn’t fat then, but you can imagine how much worse this vicious circle is with a genuinely fat child.
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I must amend my clothing recommendations. Gap doesn’t believe young men have a 29′ waist and a 36′ inseam. Or at least, there aren’t enough to bother stocking the size.
Lands End offers pants for young men with even a 27′ waist and 36′ inseam.
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I don’t think anyone is blaming the mother for trying to get her daughter to eat healthily and lose weight. The mom is doing only one of those things, and in a way that is actively harmful to her daughter’s physical and mental health. The mom is teaching the girl to starve herself and then binge on fatty foods. She is also teaching her daughter that her self worth depends on how much she weighs In what universe is that teaching a kid good food or weight management techniques? Pointing out parenting abuse isn’t the same as “moms can’t win.” This mom is depriving her daughter of whole meals, making her go hours and hours with no food (like, from lunch to bedtime), and then making her go to bed hungry. She is literally grabbing food (that she bought!) from her daughter’s hands and throwing it in the garbage. She is also publicly humiliating her daughter because of her weight. She is also totally erratic: one day she starves her daughter, the next day she loads her up on fatty treats because the mom wants to eat them too.
As for how did her daughter get like that in the first place, the mom is feeding her kids on takeout (Starbucks pastries have, like, a million calories each.) I don’t see why it’s not ok to judge socialite moms with endless time and money who obsess over themselves but can only be bothered to feed their kids chicken nuggets and Starbucks. The mom ignored the doctor’s advice for several years, before freaking out and giving her daughter an eating disorder. If instead, the mom had cut out Starbucks and given her daughter fruit as an afternoon snack, or let her daughter eat a cupcake at a birthday but taught her cupcakes are special occasion treats, or any number of small changes which would involve virtually no more time and less money currently spent, the daughter might be slimmer and healthier and not learn to view food as an enemy. Money is not an issue, so she could afford a dinner service which delivers healthy meals to her door every day. She could also afford to buy high quality pre-packaged meals, which are not great but better than gyros from a cart every day. She could also buy pasta sauce in a jar and salad mix and make her own reasonably healthy dinner for her kids in 15 minutes. Or she could hire a nanny to do so. Etc.
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My kids eat A LOT of those Starbucks pastries, but neither of them is/was a 93-pound 7-year-old (that’s nearly twice as heavy as my 7-year-old that the doctor was concerned about his weight). I think there had to be a lot more going on than that. I’m not sure what, though.
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If 7 year-olds are supposed to be 45 pounds, I think we’re going to be in trouble on ours.
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Christmas Day itself doesn’t really move the needle. The problem is the constant round of parties, cookies and gifted sweets between Thanksgiving and Jan. 1,
That is why I was saved by the 1.5 week vacation to Disney World in the intervening 5 weeks. That, combined with generally being introverted and socially awkward saved me from a lot of the parties. (“Sorry, we’d love to come, but we’ll be packing for/ in the middle of / just back from our vacation that day!”)
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I forget our little guy’s weight this past summer, but I think he was 50th percentile for weight, 25th for height, which was what was making the doctor wig out (even though with his shirt off, he looks like a tiny Olympic gymnast). I haven’t been doing anything special to him, either. He hasn’t been in any organized sports at all, but he had a year of mysterious tummy trouble where he didn’t grow or gain weight almost at all (we saw a pediatric gastroenterologist, but never figured it out).
The physical difference between my son and his older sister reminds me of me and my siblings. My sister and I (while not fat) were, shall we say, sturdy little girls. Meanwhile, our younger brother had a terrible time putting on weight, and when he was around 2 my mom had to stuff him with ice cream in a fashion that made me at 11 just about die with envy. He was a very skinny child, and that continued to be true for a very long time.
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