Ignore the emaciation culture - Anna Blundy wants her children plump and confident

My daughter is fat. She has folds of fat around her stomach and huge creases in her thighs. My son is fat too. They’re both lovely squishy, soft, biscuit-smelling puddings of things with dimples in their cheeks and knees and even in the small of their backs. They’re one and three respectively.

Sometimes, when I call one of them fatty on the street an emaciated woman in high heels will stare at me in horror. The worst imaginable insult, meant in this case, as the highest form of compliment. I hate those skinny, stringy babies that some people have, nothing to sink into.

I think it was just breast milk that did it. Or genetics. Or something. Neither of them ever eats sweets or chocolate or chips. They aren’t even allowed fruit juice at home. Why give them a glass of sugar when they could have water? They both like broccoli and fish. But they are great, big, soft, marshmallowy beasts of things and I’m so glad. Happy and healthy they look.

Of course, if they’re clinically obese as six year olds, stuffing four Big Macs a day and stealing money to buy crisps and Mars bars I’ll lock them inside with a lettuce leaf for comfort. But then I think that kind of behaviour is learnt from parents. I haven’t been in a McDonalds for at least a decade and I don’t buy chocolate or sweets ever. In fact, I don’t even buy biscuits. This isn’t a matter of principle - I just don’t much like them and the children are happy with a handful of raisins.

That is not to say that we have some hippyish aversion to anything bad for you. I often make puddings and cakes and, of course, Lev and Hope cram them down. I dyed some vanilla sauce pink with cochineal the other day and passed it off as Tubby Custard.

But I hope, to sound pious about it, that these are children who will eat quite normally as teenagers and adults. They certainly eat a lot, but they don’t eat crap. I’m not skinny (especially since they were born...) and I have never been on a diet. Ten stone and five foot six. My husband isn’t thin either and we both love food. Basically, food and eating aren’t big topics for discussion in our house. We cook it. Well, let’s face it, I cook it. And we eat it. No chance of them being anorexic because of my obsession with being thin.

Or is there? You see so many parents on Trisha and Kilroy saying they have no idea why their child suddenly became fixated on food - eating it, not eating it, throwing it up. One gets the impression that it’s all to do with insecurity and self-image, but the parents are quite convincing on the subject of their children’s former stability and general joy.

It’s hard in a media culture of emaciation - doesn’t Jennifer Anniston look better now she is painfully thin? Well, no. She looks sort of glossier and less real and a lot less sexy and happy. But it must be possible to make children, especially girls, aware of the truth. And the truth is that people look better when they’re not thin. Also, and this we already know, when they’re not fat.

I would be devastated to think that my children might not like the way they look. They are so perfect and beautiful. She isn’t quite one yet but I worry about my daughter becoming a teenager and wanting to straighten her amazing wild curly hair. Or dye it or God knows what. How will I make her aware of how lovely she is? On the other hand, maybe she will have a short back and sides and be far too busy taking her motorbike apart to worry about her hair.

And that, I suppose, is what I hope. I hope they both have so much interest in other things that they never sit around thinking about what they look like. I hope people will fall madly in love with them because they are funny and clever and fantastic and will find them gorgeous in the same way that I do - because they are, not because Hope has a short skirt on or Lev is wearing Armani aftershave.

There’s no getting away from the fact that peer pressure will dictate that they go around looking completely ludicrous for a few years, but that doesn’t have to mean dedicating their lives to the ludicrous look. My fifteen-year-old sister, for example, wears enormous longer-than-floor-length flares, tiny little bra-style t-shirts and she dyes her hair a sort of streaky red. She’s also a successful cellist and goes on week-long courses where they spend their whole time snogging and playing their instruments. You’re never going to get children to ignore their appearance entirely, but making sure they have a million other things to do must stop it being their main priority.

It seems to me that not thinking about food (apart from enjoying eating it), not focussing in any way on appearance, not addressing body image at all is the best way of dealing with it. If they’ve always got something else to think about, children will be naturally happy and sexy. Nobody who’s making too much effort ever looks good and nobody who’s fussy about food is a good dinner date.

If people stopped saying, ‘Isn’t she pretty’ about little girls they’d understand that prettiness is not the key to anything much. Or at least, that it has very little to do with your weight or outfit and a lot to do with your enthusiasm for life and your own state of mind. Attractiveness is a confidence trick that isn’t achieved by dieting or preening. That’s what everyone needs to remember.