I’d like to think that I would. Of course I say this as the parent of a really skinny kid so it’s hard to imagine.
Bringing intent into the judgment is very tricky. Who can know what another intends, really, other than by actions? Does ignorance justify anything? Babies have been shaken to death by people who claimed to have no idea that shaking babies was so dangerous.
That said, the real problem here is the widespread ignorance of our people of how to feed themselves, let alone children. I include in that the ignorance of cooking. For most people, a healthy diet is simply impossible without cooking for oneself from whole ingredients.
Erm, kinda. I’m with BigT - abuse has to be intentional, and the parent/s of this child probably aren’t intentionally causing harm. It is harmful parenting, but the kind that’s possible to change with education and other assistance (cooking classes, dietician appts, access to exercise classes) rather than punishments or taking the child away.
Again in the case of my nephews, it’s simply a case of “he stops screaming if he gets what he wants, so he gets what he wants.” I’m not in any way advocating that as a good parenting style, but it is a reality in a lot of homes - giving the kids what they want shuts them up. Is it in their best interests long-term? Of course not, but it’s a day-to-day reality.
I think that’s one of the problems with family situation I’ve described; the obese kids’ mother is raising her kids with the same terrible eating habits that she has had all her life, and I’d say doesn’t see anything wrong with them because they haven’t made her fat (by some miracle straight from heaven), in spite of the evidence that they are making her kids very fat.
I think I know those eating habits. On my mom’s side of the family, we can eat garbage and remain rail thin. That miracle expires around the age of 35, but it is truly amazing when I think of what I was able get away with eating until then.
My mother worked for CPS for over 30 years, she retired in the late 1980s or early 1990s. She would disagree strongly with the notion that abuse must be deliberate. She has seen HORRIBLE acts committed against children with truly the very best of intentions by parents.
I feel sad for fat kids. But IME (having known many fat children) it’s very very rare that anything I would consider ‘child abuse’ is happening to make them that way.
Starting when I was 11, my younger sister had a close friend who at 5 or 6 years old and about average height for that age, who weighed 100 lbs. I remember my mom mentioning this girl’s exact size/weight to a mutual friend of her and the mother of the girl, in shock - this is the only reason I know. I just looked up a children’s BMI chart, she would have had a BMI of nearly 40! She was clearly significantly overweight, but also adorable and bright and very active and most people probably wouldn’t have described her as ‘morbidly obese’.
My parents were friends with her parents as well and we spent a fair amount of time with the family over about a 4 year period. The parents were larger than my parents certainly (my parents were always smaller than most people I knew) but didn’t seem to carry much extra fat, and the sister was of an average weight. This girl was a compulsive over-eater, from what I remember of eating with her and with her family, and her parents did their very best to provide healthy food (IIRC, they ate very similarly to my family, and we were all skinny) and keep her eating in check, but it was a constant struggle, and she overate at every opportunity. My mom had to keep a pretty tight leash on her when she was over at our house (like assigning us all portions and supervising us while we ate, gently denying this girl’s requests for third and fourth helpings). Her hunger was almost insatiable.
Due to this experience and others (including my very best friend growing up, who was obese in a family of slim people mostly because she was a severely premature and underweight infant and toddler, so her mother essentially stuffed her for the first three years of her life, and it totally screwed her metabolism and instincts) I’ve always been hesitant to put blame for children’s weight on parents. Additionally, I was always underweight as a child and would undereat in some circumstances (for instance I had trouble much eating at school because I was so distracted by trying to eat my lunch in a crowd of rowdy kids in 1/2 hour), and even though my mom tried her hardest to force me to eat more and gain weight, it just became a power struggle and I probably ate less than I would have left to my own devices, because of how much focus she put on it. Most parents have the best intentions with how they feed their children, although many of them also lack the knowledge, skills or motivation to feed their kids in a way I would personally consider ‘healthy’. Most adults and parents I know do not feed themselves in a healthy way; if you can’t manage it for one person, it’s even harder for a family.
I don’t know how that disagrees with what I said, unless it somehow came across as me saying that children can only be harmed if their parents want them to be. This obese kid is being harmed, and the parents probably need help and guidance, but does the word ‘abuse’ have to be applied to every harmful action? Unintentional harm needs different remedies to intentional harm.
At some point it has to cross the line.
A chubby kid isn’t “abuse,” but what about that six year old who was too large to walk and was facing massive immediate health consequences? Someone is feeding her, and that is killing her.
This is a shot in the dark, but is there any chance she had Prader-Willi syndrome?
Good point. The reason why I brought that up is that it seems like with older people who eat a lot, they’ve had a lifetime of disordered eating to establish a huge appetite. It seems like a child with a huge appetite might need to have some kind of genetic/metabolic/neurologic problem to eat like that, and Prader-Willi was the first thing to spring to mind (from what I’ve heard, children with it really absolutely cannot stop eating or feel full).
Of course, there are probably many other reasons a child would have a huge appetite but P-W is the only defined disorder I know of.
I think this is short sighted. If anything, parents of “chubby” kids (which, by today’s standards, are certainly medically obese) are more likely culpable than when you see a child that is grossly, morbidly obese.
Normal obesity can and often is caused by bad habits, bad parenting, bad choices. Gross, morbid obesity in children is caused by some sort of disorder. It’s easy to wave ones hands in the air and say “well, they should get help”, but just like so many other poorly understood health problems (and sometimes it’s not even clear if it’s physical or mental), “help” is help, it’s not at all a solution. Parents may well be doing all that can be done, have consulted any number of experts and may even have made significant progress and still have a very fat child on their hands.
And in many cases, they may have consulted with their family doctor, gotten some useless advice, and been struggling on their own because they don’t even know where to go next. When I was morbidly obese, I found family doctors to be about as knowledgeable as your average woman’s magazine on weight loss.
Compulsive overeating is a mental illness. It’s really very rare, but when you hear news stories about massively overweight children, that’s almost certainly what’s going on. Kids don’t get like that because they are given too many ho-hos. Battling ANY mental illness is complicated and often fails. So I’m not going to judge parents like that.
I will judge parents of kids that are chronically 20% overweight. IMO, that’s a LOT more likely to be the result of poor parenting.
I guess that’s the definitional question: what is abuse? You said “abuse has to be intentional.”
As I noted, people have killed children, ostensibly unintentionally, ostensibly out of ignorance. You are saying that they are not “abusers”? Or does ignorance only excuse moderate harm to children?
Or less. That’s a good point - I’ve found family doctors completely useless on weight issues, too, so why would we expect them to be any help with an overweight kid?
So, do you think that the increase in obesity at high levels is the same as it has been historically? Or do you think that other conditions/factors are causing an increase in mental illness among children?
I think a lot of it is denial. There was a study of overweight children and most of their parents just didn’t consider them significantly overweight.
Here it is http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=60466
"Of the children in the overweight and at-risk groups, only 36% of the parents described their child as “overweight” or “a little overweight.”
In my daughter’s ballet class there is a very overweight girl. He mother is always talking disparagingly about those other girls who are just skeletons. That includes my daughter who is in the 50% in the weight categorization according to her doctor. The mom sees the other girls as too thin and her own child as normal, instead of the other girls as normal and her own child as overweight.
No, they’re not. Take, for example, the women in the 50s to 70s who took thalidomide during pregnancy. Their children were born with stunted or non-existent limbs. The children clearly were harmed, but did the mothers abuse them?
Since you keep saying ‘ostensibly,’ I guess you believe that parents aren’t really ignorant but only claiming to be to get away with abuse. While that’s probably true sometimes, it won’t always be.
I’m not talking “normal” obesity. I’ve said over and over again that managing a child’s weight is part of a parent’s responsibilities. I’m talking about the top 1% of 1% of the weight charts, the freakishly huge children who make the evening news and spark discussions about child abuse. I really don’t think they are part of the same spectrum: I think there’s something else going on. And I don’t know that kids like that are any more common today than they ever were: it’s the kids that are 20-30% overweight that are more common.
I mean, if I see at kid who hasn’t started potty training at 3, I think maybe the parents aren’t doing what they need to be doing. If I see a kid in a diaper at 9, I think there is likely something else going on.
If a child can’t read at 7, I wonder if he needs more time, better teaching, more attention. If a child can’t read at 12, a severe learning difference seems more likely.
And if I see a child who’s chunky, who can’t really run, who struggles to find clothes that fit because anything that goes around the waist is 6 inches too long in the leg, I think the parents need to change what he eats, encourage more exercise, etc. If I see a six year old who is so fat he can’t walk, I think there has to be more going on.
Okay I’m changing my answer.
For children as overweight as the little girl in that video, it would be abuse. The parent is forcing a child to suffer for her compulsive eating. She is pushing food down a child’s throat because there is no way a normal active child would ever eat that amount. That ain’t a parent just giving in on the snacks. She admits she forcefed. Babies don’t just never turn away from the bottle. They will vomit if they are constantly on a bottle. This woman was probably forcing food down the child’s throat even while she was a baby. Now THAT is no better than smacking your kid around to get them to shut up. Popping a bottle, probably even propping it, probably adding just a little oatmeal to help her sleep. Probably oatmeal with butter and cream.
I was really just thinking about some of the overweight kids in my daughter’s kindergarten class. Almost all of them are at least “soft”. My daughter is soft. She is very active and doesn’t eat much at all because of the sensory issues but she will always be soft shouldered with a round face. But there are children in that class who are close to 100 lbs. (She weighs 55) These kids still have a chance. They are still running around playing.
That woman with the biggest child in the world? She is sick. It’s the same mental issue that causes hording and Munchausen by proxy. I have worked with a child with Prader-Willi, and he was overweight but nothing like that little girl. We adults just had to take control of his eating even though he begged sometimes. We set up incentives for him and played games to distract him and it was a lot of work but damn, she just wants to kill her kid or she’s so messed up it wouldn’t possibly occur to her that what she’s doing is slowly going to kill her child, without a doubt. It’s one thing to say there’s a chance when she gets older she will suffer but she’s already suffering real serious medical conditions even in childhood. My god. I’m in tears looking at her, and looking at the food her mother presents her with. It has to be three times the amount I’d ever put on my six year old’s plate.
I wonder what happened to her.
Good news, as of 2008, she’d gotten help and lost a lot of weight.