I have no idea whether social services tried to work with the parents nutritionally or not, but I suspect that unless Mom and Dad have been living under a rock their whole lives, they already have an understanding of healthful food - they just don’t care and don’t want to change what they eat. I can kind of relate - most of the time I have to force myself to choose more healthy food and ignore the part of me that’s screaming, “Holy gods, what the hell?? There’s leftover pizza in the fridge and you’re eating vegetable soup? What are you doing with those grapes, there’s CAKE! Why aren’t you eating the food that tastes good?”
I’m still overweight, because the screaming voice wins out far more often than it should, but I’m not huge (my husband is, but he was like that when I met him), and my kids aren’t fat at all. I managed to identify most of my food issues (the main one being, my mother was a Midwestern Presbyterian, boil-it-til-it-gives-up-its-color kind of cook, which explains my preference for frozen pizza and TV dinners that persists to this day) while they were young and did my best to avoid passing them on.
The Machine Shed restaurant offered this for sale when we went there last, about two weeks back. The kid’s items on the menu have a little pig next to them. Possibly prophetic.
You should have seen Jamie Oliver trying to get the residents of [some godforsaken northern English town] to eat healthily. It really was mindblowing how little they understood about nutrition.
Do our proponents of “googling ‘healthy food’” realize that can bring up things like, say, Hasbro’s fat-free candy and Kellog’s fat-free breakfast cereals?
I’d tend to agree with you have I not known the people in the US to be so uncaring and downright defensive about the way they eat or how obese they are. They have an excuse for anything and everything. (I’m poor, can’t run, don’t have time)
THIS IS YOUR CHILDREN’S LIVELYHOOD. MAKE TIME/ GET HELP/
Tell the mom to exercise or get the kids to exercise and you may well get a “shut the hell up”
Introduce them to cooking classes and they may well decide to bake cakes instead of broccoli.
They just don’t care and expect everyone else to not care either.
I say good for the Brits. It needs to start happening here(in the US) as the only people it hurts is the children raised in this fashion.
How many plump children is it reasonable for a parent to keep in anticipation of times of hunger? The officials seem to have capped it at four, wheras the woman appears to believe that she needs seven fat morcels in reserve. Wouldn’t food stamps be a better way of keeping the parent fed?
Wow. There has to be a lot going on to get an adolescent up to 555 pounds. That kind of thing does not happen overnight and is practically against the laws of nature. I think the issue is not that the kid should be taken away from the mother because she let him get too fat, but because of extreme neglect for his well-being, as evidenced by (among other things) the fact that he weighs over 500 pounds.
Yeah, but where’s the cutoff between “fat kid” and “criminally neglected fat kid”? Obviously, 555 pounds is on the far side, but what about 400? 300? 250?
I think it’s a case-by-case thing. I know that I, personally, would be reaching out for help far sooner than at the point where my kids reaches 500 pounds and my pediatrician had damned well better do the same. If interventions had been done at more reasonable times, there could have been some indication about at what point (well before 555 pounds) parental rights would have been called into question. I also feel like this would have to be only one factor. I have a very difficult time believing that everything else in their lives is just great, but the young teenager weighs 555 pounds.
ETA: So what I mean is, there might not be a hard and fast number but rather “kid/family who has not complied with or responded to ‘x’ number of interventions and treatment strategies.”
They can’t say no to their kids? Is that something that is particularly special to low income people, or is that a British thing? Cause I’m thinking if you can’t say no to your children, you shouldn’t be a parent. Saying no comes up pretty high in the job description.
No, I expect her to say no to her kids. A grocery delivery service would be a luxury for someone who can afford to not say no to their kids. But perhaps by cutting the number of calories in her families diet, she’d be able to afford a grocery delivery service.
For someone with a LOT of money, you can hire a nanny to say no to your children for you.
I think the saddest thing about this story is that the family applied for help and had the kids taken from them. It’s too bad there isn’t some sort of mechanism whereby they can stay with the family but have some kind of state monitoring.
My little sister was a spoiled little bitch up until she was about 23 years old. It took becoming a parent from a worthless deadbeat to wake her up to personal responsibility and now she’s pretty well-adjusted and taking care of herself. What I told my parents and she even agreed with me is that, they didn’t say, “No”, to her enough when she was 2. She was born premature and they spent so much time fearing that she would die that she became their little precious and they couldn’t bring themselves to give her discipline. With my daughter who is 2, I make sure to say no, early and often, though she is so damn cute she still gets away with a lot, but even at 2 she is turning out to be an incredibly polite young girl. When she whines for something I make her say please, which she says, ‘cweeze’, and she gets so excited when it works. She understands what whining is and is beginning to understand that it doesn’t work very well on Daddy who finds it extremely obnoxious. As far as I am concerned it is a matter of self-preservation. I have to nip it in the bud now or I have to listen to whining for the next 20 years like my parents did. I think my daughter appreciates it too, she enjoys learning to be self-reliant and she finds that these problem solving mechanisms reward her with the desired results. The hardest one now is teaching her to be ‘specific’ because she says, “I want it.” ‘What do you want?’ “This one.” ‘What is this one?’ “I want it.” ‘Be specific.’ “This one.”, I’m trying to teach her to stop using pronouns, that’ll take a few months I guess.
I give my daughter more candy than maybe I should, but she is not getting fat at all and she eats lots of other things too, she loves rice. Daddy is overweight and needs to do something about it because his Father is very overweight. My daughter is an incredibly active young girl, I feel like if I can encourage her to keep staying active that maybe that will keep her from becoming fat. Also, we need to learn to cook yummy food. Healthy food can be perfectly yummy if you know how to prepare it. In Anglo-centric societies we have this pathology that makes us believe that fatty foods are better. I kind of wish I knew how to make summer rolls, those are so good and are not very fattening at all.
That’s quite a selective way to paraphrase the post of your which I was quoting. You haven’t mentioned your helpful suggestion of trying “smaller health food grocers, coops, and specialty markets (the meat market, the green grocer, the bakery)” which is utterly ludicrous in terms of both availability and cost for many lower income people in Britain. Sure there are lots of bakeries in deprived areas in Britain, but they make most of their money from cakes (targeted at children), sausage rolls, meat pies etc.
If you read the thread properly, you’ll see that the contention I was responding to was that the parents could find out all they need to know to help their children lose weight by googling “healthy food”. If you don’t actually agree with that then you shouldn’t have posted when you did.
If you read the post of mine which you quoted you’ll see that the supermarket tantrum thing was just one example of the many ways in which this idea is simplistic. The other issues I could have mentioned include: internet access, spare time for internet access, childcare, literacy, cognition, mental health, memory, the mother’s own eating disorder etc. The google suggestion makes assumptions about all of these and more.
I’m not actually arguing that the child should not have been taken away, since there are not enough facts to form an opinion. But if for the sake of the argument we assume that someone is capable of learning the coping skills I mentioned, you’re living in cloud-cuckoo land if you think she will achieve it solely by going on the internet.
You are right, in order to learn to properly parent, you’ll need to google more than healthy food - of course, for someone in poverty, googling healthy food in itself could be a challenge, I wouldn’t expect you’d have a lot of computer access - or necessarily even literacy skills.
I was reacting to the implication in your post that the internet would not provide them with parenting resources. And posting some suggestions just in case the internet was lacking. Not all tools work for all situations, but there are a TON of tools and resources for both nutrition and parenting on and off the internet. If their problem is they can’t cope with kids throwing tantrums in the store, which was your supposition, that isn’t a nutrition issue, that’s a parenting issue. And can be taken care of easily via either avoidance (don’t take them shopping with you, don’t go shopping in places where there is a lot of temptation) or the discipline to deny them. And frankly, those are not tools someone should need to provide any human being who is competent enough to care for children. People who are adult enough to be entrusted to care for children should have that level of problem solving skills.