Maternal and Child Health Professional: Well thanks Kim, we’ve finished the measurements on Josh today. Perhaps we could have a chat about those now. If you have a look on the BMI chart, you’ll see that he’s up here just on the 95th line.

Parent: Yep.

Maternal and Child Health Professional: So generally we would consider under the 85th percentile to be healthy.

Parent: Oh, okay.

Maternal and Child Health Professional: So he’s a little bit heavy, a bit overweight.

Parent: He’s overweight?

Maternal and Child Health Professional: Is that a surprise for you?

Parent: Yeah.

Maternal and Child Health Professional:  (Nodding) Yeah.

Parent: Yeah I mean he’s probably smaller than a lot of the other kids that he plays with.

Maternal and Child Health Professional: Yeah well that’s not surprising nowadays because we know that increasingly quite a lot of kids we would consider to be overweight, or a bit too heavy, um, for best health outcomes.

Parent: Yeah.

Maternal and Child Health Professional: So yeah, so that’s something we probably need to think about and talk about.

Parent: Do you think it’s a really big problem? Or, is he just gonna kind of grow out of it, you know – puppy fat kind of thing…

Maternal and Child Health Professional: Yeah, in the past we probably wouldn’t have worried too much and would’ve just hoped that things would change.

Parent: Yep.

Maternal and Child Health Professional: And they might change, but we understand that it’s probably not so likely that that will fix itself, unless you make a few changes to help that happen.

Parent: Okay.

Maternal and Child Health Professional: And we do think it’s important because if kids are overweight when they’re young, and then grow to be overweight adults, there are quite a lot of health problems like diabetes and heart disease which do relate to being overweight.

Parent: Yep.