When the safety bar on a ride would not close, Jolyn Muijsers had to get out with her protesting child. She also skipped beach days because she did not want to appear in a swimsuit. The 44-year-old from Flensburg says she weighed 140 kilograms at her heaviest. More burdensome than some daily restrictions, she recalls, was the feeling that others assumed her weight meant she could not control her children.
Judith Pape-Greif, a researcher at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, studies what she calls weight stigma affecting parents. For her dissertation in social work, she interviewed six mothers and four fathers. Rather than speaking about parents with higher body weight from the outside, she invited them to describe their own experiences. Their accounts covered a wide range of situations but also shared experiences of exclusion and scrutiny.
Pape-Greif says the parenting and caregiving abilities of people with higher body weight are often questioned because of their bodies. That creates added pressure to meet social expectations of a “good parent” and justify their place in family life. Muijsers said she always wanted to be “the very best mother.” She wondered whether her sons would be embarrassed by her at school meetings, and experienced a paediatrician’s joke about sweets as an accusation that she was a poor parent.
Muijsers’s husband and sons, now 15 and 17, are slim. She links her early weight gain to a traumatic experience when she was young and says thinness is not an achievement and being fat is not a failure. At some points she weighed 85 kilograms; she has recently lost another 30, bought a road bike and is determined to maintain her weight. Across the interviews, participants described not only open discrimination but also a persistent need to prove they can be good parents.