Agree with you on the difference in your last paragraph- clearly being overweight/moderately obese is not child abuse.
My question wasn’t written very clearly, but I actually was intending to ask you about the extreme examples. Everyone knows that childhood obesity is increasing in general; but I haven’t seen anything showing that the extreme cases are increasing, except for anecdotal evidence. Does anyone have any evidence that extreme examples, like the ones described here, are increasing?
Also, a more general comment; just because something isn’t criminal child abuse, doesn’t mean that it can’t be characterized as child abuse. Perhaps using the term abuse is a poor choice because it is often associated with criminal charges. The CDC defines child maltreatment as “any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or other caregiver that results in harm, potential for harm, or threat of harm to a child.” I think that a lot of the parenting we’re discussing falls under that category.
Yeah, that’s how it defines maltreatment, not abuse.
The difference can be important, because a parent is more likely to seek help or accept it when it’s offered if doing so doesn’t get them lumped in with child abusers. And if they simply don’t know how to eat healthily/help their child eat healthily but are willing to learn, then classes and so on will help; if they’re force-feeding a child in order to keep them dependent for longer even though they’re quite capable of not doing so, then the same classes won’t help.
I think perhaps one issue here is that people often dont notice weight gain well over time.
As in they would quite literally see their child as ‘just a bit overweight’ rather than the trainwreck we might see them as. And if they’re at a school where multiple other examples exist, they might not even see it as particularly unusual.
I wouldnt say a clear divide occurs between what interventions work for people who do direct acts vs neglect. You can get people dying for help in each camp, and people in denial or actively resisting it in both. Nor is legal vs illegal particularly useful either quite often as the law is often lagging where the research is at anyhow.
Edit: If anything non-legal is often harder, for obvious reasons.
My point, although in retrospect not the most clearly written, was that using a different term- child maltreatment- is better than using a term abuse, which has serious criminal/legal implications.
That is kind of a funny problem to address, isn’t it? I can just see the public service announcements: “Think you’re not fat? Wrong! Put down the cookie, lard-ass.” I think they’ll go over well.
Back in the old days. Mom cooked a healthy meal every day, meat potatoes and vegetables. Fat , sodium and sugar were ( for some unknown reason) never any issues. We ate to our hearts content and ate foods we didn’t like, because we couldn’t leave the table until we did. People were starving in China after all. Furthermore I never mouthed off to my elders, never had the guts to tell my parents to fuck off let alone talk back to them, because the consequences were significant, Even to the point of painful spankings when we were younger.
Well none of my 7 siblings and myself were overweight in our youth and today, most of us in our 50s and early sixties are only slightly overweight.
But I have one daughter who was slightly overweight growing up. She’s now in her late twenties and grossly overweight . It literally pains me to see it.
She blames it all on her maternal grandfather who would always make a point of reminding her she was fat when she was a kid,
Me, the father who pretty well rejected all the parenting skills of my parents felt it best not to traumatize my daughter by drawing attention to her weight. And we rarely ate out and ate home cooked meals.
I still don’t know if I failed her by pretending her weight wasn’t an issue and sometimes I wonder if we should go back to the old days of harsh discipline and parental control, but I can’t see any child abuse on my part.
Detrimental if not abuse, but there is strength in numbers, and the more common obesity becomes, the harder it will be to combat. At this point, I think we’ll just keep fattening until there is an actual food shortage.
I think if it truly takes a village to raise a child, any time that a parent of an obese child meets with a person that might have influence, that person is obligated to try to push the parent into the right activity.
Think of it this way, if a child was waaay below his reading grade, the teacher at the parent/teacher conference would be well within her rights and obligation to encourage the parent to read with the child nightly, to try to improve the problem. The parent might ignore the advice, and the child might end up being OK, but the school has an obligation to try.
Every time the kid sees a doctor, hell every time the parent sees a doctor with kid accompanying, the doctor (and perhaps the nurse) should have a quick sit down w/ the parent.
Every time the parent sees anybody from school, quick conversation. Some day it might sink in.
Hell, I’ll go far as to say that when a parent of an obese child sees another trusted (not random) adult, that adult should talk to them. Kind of an intervention. It’s for the good of the child. If you saw the parent slapping the child around, I would hope you’d say something right? Same situation here.
I’m not going to call it child abuse, but there are multiple times in our lives where we can try to do the right thing, help educate another person and ultimately help a child. I don’t care if the conversation is uncomfortable, it has to take place. You can’t just say, oh it’s not my child. That child shares the earth with you and will some day grow up into adulthood and their abilitites/disabilities will definitely have an impact on your (or your children’s) bottom line.
I have an 8 year old daughter who is quite overweight.
She walks to and from school every day (1 hour total), plays hard at recess and gym, goes swimming/skating/hiking with us on weekends.
She eats healthy foods. Doesn’t drink juice, pop, etc. We make sure there is decent protein with meals, veg, fruit, etc. Dessert & candy in our house is limited to a small serving, on weekends. She has a big appetite, but I wouldn’t say she eats compulsively. She actually eats fairly lightly for breakfast, and at school, then eats more than I do at the dinner table.
She was a very chubby baby. When babies start walking and slim down, she didn’t slim down. She was a very chubby toddler. A very chubby preschooler. Now she is a very chubby 2nd grader. She has stayed on the same growth curve.
I know what the issue is. She is hungry. I know how to “fix” her weight: make her go hungry, or curb her appetite with medications or a low carb diet. However, she is a growing child and I will not do any of those things while she is still a child and she is staying on the same growth curve she has always been at.
I teach her healthy food choices. I incorporate family exercise time. I limit screen time. When she is an adult, I will help her learn how to manage her appetite better. If she goes above her growth curve, I will seek further outside help.
Feel free to call me abusive if you want. I’m sure lots of people think it when they look at my girl.
As a case in point, I come from a family with four children. One was pretty much always obese, and the other three children and parents were normal weight.
Although parents could always try to do things to avoid it, it’s not something that is necessarily from their gross negligence that causes it. So no, not abuse.
Ironically, abuse is probably what would have to happen for parents to get some obese kids to lose weight.
I blame society. We are encouraged to sit passively at our TVs and computer monitors. We are offered a delicious diet of crap. We hear of robots being developed to do those mundane household chores we hate.
I want a couch with a built-in toilet, a sugar water IV drip, and a 24-hour Jersey Shore channel. I think I would live longer in that condition than I would if I went out and exercised.
I think that part of the problem is that there are few resources available for the emotional needs of overweight children. Adults have support groups, but kids have nothing outside of counseling, and that’s not effective if the child doesn’t understand why he’s there and the parents aren’t willing to follow the shrink’s advice.
Having been overweight for most of my life, I can also say that the struggle over control didn’t really do anything to teach me how to follow a healthy diet. All it did was turn sneaking food into a game that my parents and I could both play. (It didn’t help that my mother was – and still is – a hypocrite who saw nothing wrong with criticizing my weight while she stuffed her face with junk food.) Now that I’m an adult and understand and have internalized the consequences of being overweight and the need to lose the excess, I’m more than willing to put out the effort necessary to do so. But it’s been a long, hard struggle to get this point, because I had to put years of shitty parenting behind me.
I wonder if someone who is not noticing their kid become obese (or not slim down the baby fat), isn’t taking their kid to the doctor. That sounds like a fair excuse, until I remember that my kids were going to the doctor at least twice a year through three - and yearly until seven. Without the additional trips for “strange rash,” “weird sprain” etc. And I can’t think of a time we went for a checkup that we didn’t discuss their height, weight and what they eat.
I am going to guess, Sam I Am, that you can’t take your kid to the doctor without “learning” that she is obese, and given a handout or a suggestion to visit a nutrionist.
Okay you’re abusive. Now stop making excuses.
No really, I don’t know if it’s abuse or not. I don’t know what you mean by “chubby”. To you a little pooch could be chubby. To me it means she’s significantly overweight, and if you’re letting her remain significantly overweight there’s either an underlying health problem or you’re not doing what you need to do to help her. Not child abuse. Maybe neglect; but it’s not like I know you or anything about you. You could just be setting up a scenario to play the devil’s advocate. I have no idea.
Since you brought it here though I’ll give you my opinion:
You are really messing her up waiting until she’s an adult to help her, and so what if she needs meds or a better diet? She needs to be taught these things and it’s your job, not hers. And really it is SO MUCH harder to lose it. Your body will fight weight loss; I don’t give a damn what anyone says. It’s more than calories in, calories out.
Also, this thing about her being hungry. I wonder if she’s really hungry or she is just saying she’s hungry. I have a kid who will eat a full meal and if she knows there’s ice cream in the freezer will tell me she’s still hungry when I know she isn’t. That’s not hunger, that’s wanting oral stimulation. Or it could be hormonal. Surely you’ve made her doctor aware and hormones have been checked? She may have been a chubby baby for a reason. Doctors don’t just naturally check hormone levels just because babies are overweight. They may check for diabetes if there are other reasons. It’s up to you to push and push to help your child remain healthy, and chubby is not healthy. Why make excuses? Are you in denial? Do you know what a proper portion size is for a child her age? Is it just not that big a deal to you? Weight issues can be cultural I know. My SO doesn’t see a thing wrong with overweight children and it’s a constant struggle to keep him from feeding our daughter chips and candy as a way to make her smile. She has sensory issues so she is SO PICKY already, and given the choice between chips and broccoli she’d pick chips every time. So I have to push her to eat it. Sometimes I have to mash it up and mix it with food she does like. And sometimes I just have to say no, knowing she’ll be hungry because she won’t eat the good stuff and I refuse to give her the bad stuff. She was a chubby, demanding baby, a chubby demanding toddler, and if I didn’t work hard to make sure he eats right she’d be a chubby kindergartner. Sometimes I have to be the bad guy.
So maybe I’m a bitch for saying it, but I’m seeing excuses. And they are excuses I know well because I have a 21 year old overweight daughter who I didn’t do the right thing with, and I regret it tremendously. I will not let the same thing happen with her little sister and she feels the same way.