We all know how impressionable kids are, and the things that happened to them in their childhood can become core memories that last a lifetime.
Mom Heather Taylor certainly didn’t expect that’s what her daughter would come away with after a recent trip to Chick-fil-A, but an interaction between her little girl and the restaurant’s manager that she says was highly inappropriate has left them both upset — especially because she says the restaurant has done nothing to rectify it.
“I never thought that I would have to deal with Chick-fil-A basically body shaming my 6-year-old,” Taylor angrily said in a video on the matter. “I don’t even know how to fix that with her.”
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The incident happened while Taylor and a friend were taking their kids to the Chick-fil-A location in Apex, North Carolina. When she stepped out of the play area to take her oldest child to the restroom, “a manager decided to barge into the play center, go directly to my 6-year-old child, and start berating her about how she was just too big.”
Taylor admitted that she failed to notice that her daughter, who is tall for her age, was over the play center’s height limit. However, she felt the manager’s handling of the situation was incredibly inappropriate.
“If you have an issue, you go to an adult; you do not go to a child,” she said. Her friend was watching her daughter at the time, and she is furious the manager didn’t speak to her instead of humiliating her child, “berating her in front of everybody else, who is now staring.”
“We wonder why all these girls have such issues with their image,” Taylor went on to say. “This is why. Because now my 6-year-old has a core memory that I cannot take back, I cannot change for her, of being told she’s too big at the Chick-fil-A.”
The entire debacle felt totally unnecessary to her because she said if the manager had simply spoken to her or her friend about the height limit, the issue would have easily been rectified.
“Instead, I have to console my child who’s crying,” she said. “I have to ride all the way home with my child who’s looking at me, telling me… mama, why was that lady so mean to me?”
She’s certainly not wrong to worry about this. A 2017 study found that comments about a child’s body and weight often directly result in a negative body image in adulthood, even if they are thin and even if the childhood comments were positive. It also puts them at far higher risk of eating disorders, which have the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses.
Taylor eventually spoke to both the Chick-fil-A corporate office and the location’s owner about all of this, but that only made the situation worse.
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Taylor says that right from the start, everyone she asked for help has refused to take her seriously. “When I went to the director who was also working there, (she) blew me off,” Taylor said. “Just blew me off.” When she escalated the situation further to both the corporate office and the location’s owner, it got even worse.
“Corporate never said anything to me outside of the generic, ‘We got your email, and thanks for calling,'” Taylor said. As for the location’s owner, he defended the manager as a faithful employee of 12 years, and since the surveillance video had no audio, he relied entirely on his employee’s account of the situation — an account Taylor’s friend said was “crap” and bore no resemblance to what actually happened.
“He offered no sincere apology,” she said. “He told me that the manager did no wrong, that she was a wonderful person.” Taylor said that she believes that’s probably the case and that “maybe she had an off day,” but to her, that’s not the point.
“In my 6-year-old’s mind, she now feels that there’s something wrong with her because now she was told that she was too big,” Taylor said.
For that reason and many others, Taylor’s story has left tons of people on social media furious. Everyone has an off day at work now and then, but yelling at a kid that isn’t yours should be a red line that nobody crosses.
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John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.
