“I’m a good parent because I had bad parents”: narratives of care and moral worth in fat liberation discourse

This article examines how fat body positive individuals construct narratives of moral worth through caring practices. Drawing from qualitative interviews with eleven fat body positive individuals, I explore how participants navigate societal expectations, health discourses, and caring practices to establish parental legitimacy. Through narrative analysis, I demonstrate how fat parents employ caring practices as a form of moral currency to counter stigmatization, while negotiating complex tensions between body positive ideology and dominant health discourses. The findings reveal that caring practices serve as both performance and technique in establishing parental worth, extending beyond biological children to encompass broader social relationships. This research contributes to fat studies scholarship by revealing how caring practices operate as moral currency, extending theoretical frameworks on fat embodiment and parental worth.