I wouldn’t blame a fat ten year old for being fat any more than I would yell at a two year old for not being potty-trained yet.
Kids are not old enough to exercise basic self control. So…the parents have to make some decisions for them.
I’m sure they were. And I’m sure their parents are to blame.
But you do realize you sound kind of immature snarking on a six-year-old’s sense of style, right?
I don’t think *any *six year old should be dressing like a hoochie mama. She was shorter than my son and looked like she had breasts and her large TUNIC STYLE shirt couldn’t even cover her belly properly and her bust was smooshing out the sides.
You wanna call that immature snark? Go ahead. She’ll be on the People of Wal-Mart site soon enough. 
And I blame her parents for that.
To recap, monstro:
and
I’m sorry - I’m sure your sister is wonderful, but right now, this obese thirteen year old has issues that she should not have. And your sister is partially to blame (along with your brother-in-law) for not addressing this. She may be a wonderful mother, but this is abusive. And it’s sad.
And that’s why you’re not an asshole, and my dad was :).
The only thing to keep in mind is, those decisions need to be family why. Kids learn by watching adults; and if mom or dad has a giant ice cream sundae, but they’re not allowed to have any, it’s going to send some pretty strong messages.
She’s not perfect.
She has personal issues.
But she is not an abusive mother.
I agree. This is why I have a chocolate stash in my desk at work. 
I’m not saying she’s trying to hurt anyone. I am saying that neglecting your child’s health is abusive - even if it’s not your intent. But…anyway…I thought the purpose of your OP was to ask if people blamed parents for their obesity because your sister’s young children were obese. I’m not attacking your sister as a person. I’m attacking the “I don’t want to deal with this” mentality. If my kid had teeth rotting out of his mouth, I wouldn’t neglect him and not take him to the dentist. I also wouldn’t neglect to have ‘the Talk’ with my son (more than once/all the variants of it) just because it may be ‘uncomfortable’.
I can’t answer the OP’s question, specifically, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I went to Meijer on Saturday to do my first of the month stocking up, and it really hit me how hard it is to make good shopping decisions, even as someone who was taught how to eat right and how to cook. When I see comments like Citizen Pain’s, it’s upsetting because I think it would be damn near impossible to make the right food choices if you grew up in a house full of junk, or if you weren’t taught how to buy and prepare food. It might seem like common sense, but I don’t think it is, especially when you look at the lies we’re told about nutrition our whole lives.
A good friend of mine who I grew up with was very obese growing up, and so were her parents and her brother, and all of her extended family. She wouldn’t have known how to lose weight if her life depended on it, and as with many overweight people, food was a comfort thing for her. I watched her get tortured every single day at school, and defended her more than I could count. Both of her parents died in their '40s, and that was a wakeup call for her. So now, for the last 15+ years she’s battled with her weight and eating. She’s one of these people who looks at food and gains weight, and it’s not for lack of trying that she hasn’t been able to make the weight loss happen.
It’s so much more complicated than people think.
Well, this is why I was talking about young children. I grew up in a house full of junk food (as I disclosed in an earlier post) and I still can’t cook. My mom would buy all this junk and then tell me I ate junk and too much of it. She ate like a mouse and was thin. Our house was: mac and cheese, Doritos, fruit rollups, frozen pizza, soda.
But…It’s not an excuse to let my kid get obese before puberty, though. I also understand that it is hard to buy healthy food with little income. I live paycheck to paycheck atm, unfortunately.
But if you’re in a situation where everyone is overweight and you want to do something for your kids, there’s no reason why you can’t educate yourself, go to a doctor, learn how to cook if it’s your thing (not sure what it is about me - I just really don’t like eating warm food) or learn how to cook better.
Information is everywhere.
Parents who fail to act are being abusive. I’m not saying remove the kids from the home right off, but how is this NOT a concern?! There are also parents who think it’s okay to whip kids with belts and that doesn’t make it right.
It’s O.K. to love food. It’s O.K. to eat high fructose corn syrup if you want.
It’s just not O.K. to give your kids health and self esteem problems because you ate a big bowl of Excuses for breakfast.
The OP is talking about teenagers though - one is 13 and one is older than that. Kids become incredibly hard to control at that age and any efforts you make to change their behaviour can backfire dramatically. I still don’t think it’s as easy as you’re making it sound. Even with healthy food in the house, even with PE at school, even with sincere talks and hearty shaming, some kids are still going to have weight issues. Pressing the issue can damage the kids health and self esteem and have life-long effects that are more serious than the effects of being overweight.
This is a pretty far cry from whipping your kids with a belt. It’s pretty extreme to describe the OPs sister as ‘abusive’.
I think you’re chalking things up to laziness and excuses when there are many other issues at play here. I mean, think about how many overweight people try to lose weight and can’t do it to save their lives. If it was so simple, and just a matter of “educating yourself” then all of the smart people I know would have no trouble at all, right? Well, that’s not the case.
And I get that you might be able to make those changes for yourself, but there are complicated factors in a lot of people’s lives that make these things more difficult than you think. Bottom line, I think it’s shitty to judge when you don’t know what a person’s background is, or anything at all about their parenting or their life. My stepdaughters have both been chubby growing up and into their teens, and we eat nothing but homecooked, healthy food around here. So does that make us abusive parents? I don’t think so.
And like I said, CitizenPained, I don’t see my sister doing anything wrong.
Granted, I’ve rarely been with her 24/7. And I do think they eat better (quantitatively as well as nutritionally) than when we came up. But I just don’t compute that as abuse. I mean, our parents were crazy with food too, just in a different way. My sister is operating on “let’s do the opposite of what they did” mode. She doesn’t spoil her kids, she gets firm and says “no” to her kids, but she doesn’t forbid them to eat anything when they get home from school and then serve them blue soda and hot dogs for dinner. She doesn’t beat them when they don’t eat everything nasty canned vegetable given them (ever tasted a canned asparagus? It’s better than ipecac, believe me.)
When you say, “What she’s doing is abusive…”, well, you’re saying she’s being abusive. Which is just a couple of words away from saying she’s an abusive mother. Save that shit for someone who’s giving their kids a nervous breakdown or locking them in their rooms or something. Not for a loving mother who dropped her own career to make more time for them as they entered adolescence, who makes me envious of my own nieces because they have an accessible mother and a father that doesn’t scare the living crap out you when he gets mad.
For the record, I have no idea what she’s doing to “rectify” her kid’s behavior. Because it’s none of my business and I’ve never asked her. As far as I know, she could be having them both go to nutritionists etc. I do know the youngest has ADD, which brings with it impulsivity. She doesn’t like the drugs so she doesn’t take them on a regular basis. I don’t like how some drugs treat me, so I can’t blame the kid for that. She’s making great grades in advanced classes, making friends, and doing sports so I’m not in a position to judge her as being in a sad state. She’s leagues more “involved” and happier than either her mother or I was when we were at her age. Perhaps our parents were abusive–or did abusive things–too? We could go around calling people abusive all day long but it wouldn’t fix anything.
Let’s see… been either overweight or obese for most of my life. I’m as fat as I’ve ever been at about 290 lbs and 6’1" and about 28% body fat right now.
I don’t blame my parents one bit, but I guess if I had to hold my parents responsible for some aspects of this, it would be two things- comforting with food, and not really teaching me effective portion sizes. The combination of these two tends to mean that if I’m stressed out or unhappy, I tend to eat too much of the wrong things. Oddly, if I’m happy and stressed (like the birth of our child), I’ll actually lose weight.
Yup. My mom has always made comments about people’s weight - mine, my sister’s, the rest of our family’s, friends’, strangers’. She seems to enjoy tearing people down, whether it’s because they’re too thin or not thin enough. Every time she sees one of her high school friends, she comments on how fat she/he is.
My cousin was a model starting when I was 8 or 9. She was skeletally thin at that point, and my mother was constantly asking me why I couldn’t look more like her. My aunt has always been skeletally thin as well, to the point where she brags that her doctor tells her to gain weight. I think a lot of it is jealousy on my mom’s part. She and I have similar body types (no matter how I try to deny it), though I’m lucky that my top filled out along with my bottom when I gained weight, so I have more of an hourglass figure than she does. Now that I’m older, I don’t carry it as well as I used to, but it’s more evenly distributed.
Anyway, she’s several sizes larger than I am, but can’t seem to help herself when it comes to commenting on my size, the food I eat, how much, whether I exercise, etc. When she’s visiting, if she’s sitting on the couch in the family room (which is right next to the kitchen) and hears me puttering around and cleaning up, she demands to know what I’m eating. Most of the time I’m not snacking, but she assumes I’m standing around eating because she does that. Frequently. I feel like her comments are almost comments about herself that she’s projected onto me.
This is what my parents do as well. They’re also fans of going to buffets and remarking on how many fat people are there. It would be one thing if they were doing it in a way that suggested they lumped themselves in with them, as in “Look at how fat all of us are in here”. But they don’t do this. They honestly sound as though they see themselves as being different than the people they’re judging. It is both embarrassing and fascinating.
I don’t even have to bite my tongue when they slip into this act, because I just tune them out. It makes no sense to me.
where in the heck do i begin. I was thin until about age 8, i steadily gained weight and was a full blown obese by the time i was 11 which happened to be the year my dad got custody of me I know now i had Polycystic Ovaries but my dad never took me to the doctor for it despite the fact i never got my period. Why go to the doctor - they just want your money and are trying to play god… When i was 18 and finally had my own insurance i went to the doctor and got diagnosed. By that time i was morbidly obese. My dad was too drunk and too busy swinging his fists around to even know i was there. He only bought junk food. Hamburgers and french fries were a standard meal we had 2-4 times a week. I was left alone to eat in solitude 7 days a week while he was at the bar upstairs. (we had an apartment that was in the basement of a bar, lucky for a drunk i suppose)
I really don’t know if i had started gaining weight because of the onset of puberty or because i was molested by my mothers boyfriend and it was a way to keep people away from me. I moved in with my dad because my mother had accused me of seducing her boyfriend who started molesting me when i was 6. It continued until i was 9. More then likely it was a combination of the two.
My parents were nightmares - the only time i had any comfort was when i ate.
wow do i fell like debbie downer…
It seems like the sister wasn’t doing anything at all if you read the OP. And I’m sorry, but Suzie Q needs to know that her mom knows her obesity is an issue and the family is going to deal with it. Because that’s what parents do. It’s part of loving your child. They can’t make those decisions for themselves. It’s UP TO THE PARENTS.
In most states, neglecting an aspect of the health of a child is a form of child abuse. That’s what I was getting at. If you could separate abuse into ‘passive’ and ‘active’, I suppose it would be ‘passive’.
It sounds like your sister has rose colored glasses on. If my son were Rx’d a drug, he’d have to take it. Period. If my son were obese, we’d deal with it (though not sure how he’d get obese overnight, but for the sake of the argument).
You can be active and chubby as a thirteen year old. If you’ve always been that way, the likelihood it will extend into adulthood is high.
Gee, I donno:
A. Be responsible and take charge of your child’s health in a proper manner and perhaps they are uncomfortable/feel bad
or
B. Let them grow up obese and watch them suffer a lifetime of pain because you didn’t want to be the bad guy?
This thread is disgusting. No, she’s not whipping her kids with a belt, but instead she’s setting them up for a lifetime of physical and mental issues.
Sheesh. Will you stop?
You can make a 13-year-old take all the Ritalin in the world* and make her go to psychotherapy multiple times a week, and gently steer her to a vegan diet, and you could still have an obese child. Because the child is not you. You are not the child. Unless you’re with them 24 hours a day, you can’t control everything. Including their metabolisms. In fact, the more you try to pathologize them, the more havoc you may cause to their self-esteems. As evidenced by this thread.
If a 13-year-old breaks the law, is it the parents’ fault? Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes the 13-year-old is just being willful and you can plead with them to change and do all the “right” things to try to fix them. But ultimately, they are who they are. Completely independent of you.
I can’t wait for your perfect little boy to grow up and have issues that YOU cannot control. We’ll see how quick you are to call out other parents for being so abusive.
There are some things my sister probably could do better. No one is perfect. But seeing as how neither she or my brother-in-law are obese, I’m having a hard time blaming them for MUCH. Because I’m not seeing anything that is objectively wrong or, as you say, abusive with their parenting styles.
*Frankly, if I had a kid diagnosed with ADD and she wasn’t getting into trouble at school and was making good grades and enjoying life, I wouldn’t force the drugs on her either. Because drugs come with their own side effects and should be used as a last resort. They definitely shouldn’t be used as some type of general treatment for weight loss.
I don’t really know. While my mother was alive, I was very thin; probably underweight. She did most of the cooking even when she was very ill, and from what little I can recall, I didn’t like it. She would fry pork chops till they were hard and dry (that’s how you cooked pork back then) and I would mostly eat rice. I had a lot of allergies.
After she died, my father gave it a try, but the only things he really knew how to make were chili and baked beans. Not what you’d feed 7- and 8-year-old girls. So he brought home chips to fill us up. Predictably, we gained weight and fast. The difference between my second-grade and fourth-grade pictures makes me sick to think about.
So I started cooking, and found that I was very good at it. When my father started reminiscing about the dishes his mother used to make (chicken paprikash! sour cream in everything!), I took it as a personal challenge. The Viennese know how to cook, baby. When we’d visit my aunt and uncle, it was cheese and crackers and chips and dip with cocktails (and the kids got Coke).
I don’t see how there’s anybody to blame.
I was small and skinny until I was around 7 years old when I was swimming at a pool and some kid I didn’t know called me fat. Looking back I definitely wasn’t, not skinny but definitely not fat.
I fight with my weight now, and frequently pinball +/- 40 lbs which I know is awful for me. If I look at my childhood I think the contributing factors to my being overweight are:
-During my mother’s first marriage from 1st-6th grade or so, my stepfather was a very good cook and cooked healthy meals. I was chubby but not fat at this point…but we NEVER had snacks at home. EVER. So whenever I could get my hands on cookies, I would ravenously tear through them. My money would go to flaming hot cheetos when I could get them.
I struggle with snack foods as an adult now, and I literally can’t help myself, when I grocery shop I only buy 1 or 2 snack items because I know within 2 days all the snack foods will be ran through. I can’t have snack foods in the pantry that I reasonably go through a handful at a time, when I have snack foods I eat them. I think if I had been taught a healthier attitude toward snack foods other than “You can never have them”, I would be thinner. Also as an adult with my own place and own money now, I occasionally buy cereal that isn’t disgustingly bland, I buy the sugary crap kids cereals, because I was denied them as a kid. I run through this way too fast and try not to buy it.
-As another poster mentioned, I was a latchkey kid from when my mother divorced her first husband, I was allowed to go outside but most of the neighborhood kids were utter jerks so I played videogames and ate. For most of this time my mom was too poor to put me into an extra-cirricular activity, and there was no baseball league in the area at the time (my favorite sport to play). Eventually I got into a martial arts program and trimmed down to pudgy and not fat.
I definitely have emotional problems with eating, I over-eat when I am depressed which has been frequent since around 12 years old. I am not grotesquely huge but I feel I am too young to be this overweight.
edit: Also after 6th grade when my mom divorced my stepdad, my mother COULD NOT COOK, and no one ever taught me to cook, so I literally ate popcorn and things for dinner because I just didn’t know how to make anything else. I make healthy things like stews and soups from scratch now for myself. 