Deakin University's Global Obesity Centre (GLOBE) has proposed that every Australian child have their height and weight measured and recorded in primary school unless parents “opted out” of the checks. This proposal is supposedly to tackle Australia’s "obesity epidemic", with GLOBES' Professor Steven Allender  claiming the current information about obesity is inaccurate and researchers have “no real understanding of the size of that problem”.

Parents and health professionals, such as myself, are gravely concerned about the impact this will have on kids. It guarantees that fat bodies are shamed and stigmatised. It also sends kids a parents a very confused message that health and a low body weight are the same thing- they are not. Further, their proposal goes against decades of research that demonstrates weighing kids neither reduces childhood obesity or improves the psychological health of children.