That being said I don’t BLAME anyone for my being overweight as an adult, no one did anything that could have been forseen to cause my weight problems really. I can lose weight and often do, I just lack the will power to resist food, and I’m lazy and the only excercise I like is wrestling/brazilian jiujitsu, and it’s very hard to practice often for my situation…
Interesting how disgusted CitizenPained is with overweight kids, and how she knows exactly what she would do to handle the situation IF her son was overweight. Of course she’s made it clear that he doesn’t have that problem. Her son is obviously learning to be equally judgmental and disgusted with fat people just like dear old mom.
It’s very easy to sit on the porch and raise the neighbor’s kids. Good luck having all the answers when the kid gets older and gets some issues of his own.
I must’ve misunderstood you.
Yup. I’m just sitting here hating on the fat kids. :smack:
My son is learning to make healthy lifestyle choices. I’m sure you have issue with that.
CP,
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You are using the word “abuse” to mean something it does not mean, like someone else in a GD thread has been using “consensus.”
Yes some here have been victims of abuse, being insulted and demeaned by their parents, or in some cases worse, but that is not what you are talking about. You are not even talking about “neglect”. What you are doing is seeing a fat child and assuming that, more likely than not, the parents have not tried and have had access to good advice. At worst you are accusing parents of ignorance. -
You appear to have an impression that it a fairly simple thing to do something about a fat child. Just go the doctor and get information. As one of those doctors, it is not so simple. We are not so powerful. If only. Parents, who have sometimes never learned the best lifestyle choices themselves, can indeed do their best to learn how to provide a household of good nutritional choices and to encourage exercise, t limit electronic entertainment time, to have a good breakfast available, to have family dinners when possible, so on, all in a manner that is warm and loving and not controlling (and I’ve already cited the studies that show how authoritarian controlling parenting styles are counter-productive in this area), but even when they pull that off, their kids go out into a very obesiogenic world. The home is not the only environment these kids are existing in. It is doable, but it is not simple or easy. Success may mean a child who is overweight but who is now a bit less overweight and is eating a healthier selection of foods and exercising much more; the kid you may still be seeing as fat.
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Yes there are parents who just don’t know. Or who can’t get past the idea that the way to show your love is to with food and that the way to reward good behavior is with a treat. Or who really can’t see there is a problem. Parents who really don’t care? Only a very very few. And to assume that a fat child is more likely than not caused by parents intending to be hurtful (which is what the term “abuse” means) is a very way out of bonds assumption.
I know that back in the 60s, and possibly in the 50s, parents did take their fat kids to doctors, who prescribed uppers for the kids. Yeah, the kids lost weight. However, there were a few side effects…
I’ve seen too many fat DOCTORS to believe that doctors have some sort of magic cure. If a doctor, or anyone really, had some cure for obesity that actually worked, for most patients, without horrendous side effects, that person could charge a small fortune for each cure, and people would be glad to pay. As it is, most cures don’t seem to work, either in the short run OR the long term. Not even bariatric surgery, and I’d hate to see that sort of surgery routinely performed on kids.
As an overweight mom of four healthy-weight kids, I feel like I’m putting myself squarely into the “hypocrite” category. I’ve lost weight before, I know how it’s done, but currently don’t have the extra money for gym memberships, Weight Watchers meetings, nor the extra time to pursue those things, with four kids under the age of 6 to take care of. I’m just too overwhelmed to manage much more than maintaining my current weight, and every so often shaving off a pound or two.
I teach my kids about portion control, give them healthy snacks (or if they’re unhealthy snacks, at least they’re tiny in portion), I don’t let them drink soda or graze on chips or candy. I encourage them to exercise, even if it’s just running around in the front yard or suggesting that they rock on the rocking horse while they’re watching TV.
My own mother seems to have done a fairly similar, contradictory routine. Fed us healthy, encouraged exercise, discouraged junk food and soda, but she herself was always overweight. My brother and I stayed pretty thin and healthy til our 30s; now we’re both overweight. Me, because I wound up having 4 kids in 5 years. Add in some serious prenatal complications that put me on bedrest for each pregnancy. At my heaviest, I was nearly double my target weight of 150. And while I’ve lost a lot of that, I’m still 50 lbs overweight, 14 months after my last baby was born. I feel discouraged about it, and not sure that I’ll ever get back to a healthy weight again.
I don’t think I’d blame it on genetics though. I don’t really doubt that the weight would come off if I exercised and dieted for a year. I just don’t seem to have the drive to get it done without some help.
I tried to clarify before by saying “neglect” instead of “abuse” and noting that most states consider “neglect” a form of “child abuse”. I understand those words can hurt people but I still stand by my statement that it is a parent’s duty to, well, be a parent. If your child is morbidly obese, the state can do something about it if you’re not responsive.
Do I need to repeat myself and say again that this is what I’m talking about?
**monstro **noted his nieces were obese and that his sister was hesitant because she didn’t want to hurt their feelings. How big do the girls have to get before she does something? But this is more than monstro’s sister - again, she may be making mistakes as a parent but that doesn’t make her a bad parent. As he’s told us, she’s a very loving and involved mom.
This is about parents in general who are fine with letting their kids eat themselves to death.
It’s about parents who do nothing.
I never said results were easy. I said action was easy. And to those who say, “parents may not know…”, uh, there’s information out there. If you really truly care and having a healthy child is your goal, you’ll do something about it. Not doing anything is more harmful.
Parents who do nothing = neglectful, which, imo, is abuse, but if you want to use the word neglect, that’s fine.
If you don’t care that your child is fat because you’re ignorant versus not caring because you don’t care about the child, does the child have different health results? Not really.
I put ‘neglect’ in the form of ‘passive’ and ‘abuse/hitting/etc’ in the form of ‘active’ forms of abuse. I trust you read the thread before responding, where you would’ve seen I was talking about parents who were taking no action. If you would like to use a different word for these things, go ahead.
But it doesn’t change the fact that parents have a responsibly to act when their children have health problems and enabling those problems is hurting the child.
btw, the ‘look of horror’ that my son and I had at the theatre was at two obese parents with very obese children who were boggled full of soda, candy and popcorn!
Action is easy; action that does more good than harm … that is difficult. No, it is not automatically true that not doing anything is more harmful. Do I need to repeat myself? Of the parenting styles those who were neglectful had less poor child outcomes than those who were authoritarian. Laying down the law, punishing for not following the diet plan, etc. … causes real harm and worse outcomes. You can read in this thread some examples of parents who “did something” and caused real harm. No, I am not advocating being neglectful, but I am pointing out that just saying a parent “should do something” evinces an ignorance of what is actually involved.
Yes you are talking about parents who you believe are “doing nothing” and you demonstrated that to you the fact that a child is fat is de facto evidence that the parent is willfully doing nothing and don’t care. Hence your presumption that montro’s and you’s sister is abusive. Guess what, having some apprehension about doing the wrong thing is intelligent. After all, it seems that many feel that the right way to act to motivate someone who is fat is to insult them and/or try to take the control over food completely away from them. To bully them into compliance. And that really does do measurable harm.
Tell me, of the fat kids you see, what percent do you believe have parents who do not care? On what basis have you come to that conclusion? I can tell you from my vantage point as a pediatrician I see lots of fat kids and I see extremely few parents who do not care. Oh some who do not have the parenting skills to follow through, some who can’t pull off being authoritative, can’t manage how to provide the consistent limit setting that actually teaches a child how to make independent decisions, or even who can’t get past how they were raised, or who tell the child not to eat the cookies that they still keep in the house and that the child sees them stuffing into their own faces. Or who are dealing with their own parents providing daycare for them and being unable to limit set how grandma stuffs the kid. But who don’t care? Very very few.
CP, I very much agree that preventing obesity before it starts is critical. Parents need to get the message from a variety of sources that sweetened beverages, especially juice boxes, are toxic (I’ve taken to calling them “pediatric crack”), that breakfast really does matter, that their job includes giving the child many healthy food choices, few bad ones, and then letting them decide which ones to eat and not fighting over it, that active play with the kids and limiting electronic entertainment time is key, and how to provide limits with more positive than negative messaging. Yes, we pediatricians can be part of that educational process, and are in position to identify who is at greatest risk of future obesity either because of family history, or because the growth charts are already demonstrating an “early adiposity rebound”. It would be wonderful if there were both documented effective interventions to call upon once those risks were identified and the resources to use them. Meanwhile we can at least do our part in that educational process and hope that the rest of society does its job too, keeping cookie snack time limited in preschools, restricting the sorts of ads aimed at kids, and so.
The problem of the increased rates of obesity is not that suddenly parents have abdicated their jobs of limit setting, any more than it is that the gene pool has suddenly changed. It is a function of the sort of food choices available, the quantity they are available in, and our “lackamotion”. Parent’s need to learn new tools to deal with this current world and society needs to help. But finger pointing is not a useful part of the process.
Thanks for the back up, DSeid. It’s good to get a doctor’s perspective on this issue.
CitizenPained, I’m a woman. Just for future reference.
I’m wondering–and DSeid, feel free to reject this hypothesis–if some “fat acceptance” can also be implicated, or if it is at least a variable that did not exist so much in the nebulous “back in the day” that could be interacting with other factors. If the average kid is skewed towards overweight/pudgy in a particular school, perhaps a kid that is fat does not feel like a “sore thumb” as much as they used to. Maybe it’s only really the extreme cases (really skinny or morbidly obese) that get picked on nowadays?
My oldest niece once plopped down beside me on the couch and asked why my twin and I were so skinny. I looked around and noticed that we were the analomies in the room. Both sides of her family are populated by almost exclusively “robust” and “curvaceous” people. This was back when I was at BMI of 22 or 23–so I was not anoxeric-looking at all. Perhaps her perception of what is normal and abnormal is off, as well as her mother’s? I could see the overweightness (yes, I know, made-up word) creeping up on them simply because it mirrors what everyone else looks like.
<sigh> To me, ‘do something’ means: learn how to cook, educate yourself, see a doctor, have an (appropriate) talk, whatever. It doesn’t mean go Tiger Mom on the kid. I said earlier in the thread that’s not appropriate. At all. And my mom was mean to me for being chubby, so I can only imagine what my life would’ve been like if she had started punishing me for sneaking chips.
Perhaps I misunderstood her; I thought she said she felt her sister was hesitant because she didn’t want to repeat their mom’s mistakes so she did nothing.
Well, to the kids with the parents in the movie theatre: it wasn’t hard to determine the parents didn’t care about the kids’ weight.
For my best friend, she grew up in a house where food = love and a little chubby was a good thing. My friend took it too far, though. It’s not because they had bad parents. It’s because she and her sister had parents with different ideas about food. Wrong ideas about food. They made mistakes. On top of it, they grew up in a house full of Mom’s-homecooked-but-bad-for-you food.
I can tell you from my vantage point as a teacher that I see a lot of fat kids with parents that don’t care (about anything), period, and if a parent is taking their child to a doctor, that is ‘action’ to me. That is effort. That is something.
I don’t think that having cookies in the house where obesity is a problem is a smart idea. Those are excuses.
I agree and I think that teachers/community leaders/laymen can do it, too. I half-wonder how much of an effect my son’s ‘Healthy Kids’ program has had on him. When he started to become more aware of things and I was packing his lunch in kindergarten (still do), I started to educate him on food portion and healthy food choices and stuff. We do everything together, so it made sense to grocery shop and pack lunch together, too. When he’d start repeating things they talked about in school, I realized what a great program it was and reinforced it when I could.
I realize my son has a different lifestyle than most kids and I can appreciate the things that parents come up against. I guess for me, I’ve seen what food addiction can do -it’s killing my dad- and I know what it’s like to feel uncomfortable with your weight/figure/looks/etc. To add ‘obese’ to the daily trials and tribulations of childhood/teen years can be a very bitter thing.
Again, I am sorry if I sounded like I was making monstro’s case personal, but I was talking about parents who do nothing.
In education/teenage delinquency - I see parents who try to do things for their children and they go about all the wrong way, I see parents who try to do things for their kids and it’s a little late to be starting but they are trying, but too often - most often - I see parents who have given up. (Given up in general.)
On the other hand, I see parents who are very involved and spoil their children and can’t deny them anything. A few of those kids are overweight and go to my son’s school. They have everything any kid in my classroom could ever want (passports, vacations, their own bedrooms, nice clothes, memberships to the community center, their own homes, etc.) and their parents are allowing this unnecessary burden of obesity to happen because they can’t say ‘no’.
There is not just one model of parent with an obese child, but you can’t deny that a child’s health is your responsibility. If a kid’s teeth were rotting out of his mouth, wouldn’t we expect the parent to go to the dentist?
Monstro, I would certainly talk to your sister, the girls’ mother. At age 13, the parents are still responsible for 90% of what a kid is eating. Even if the daughter is eating all the food she can find during school hours, the rest of what she eats is being provided by the parents. Speaking from personal experience, the parents need to be shopping and cooking as though the daughter is on a diet, like Oprah’s personal chef/diet guru. The meals have to be plated out, with no second helpings. No snack food at all in the house, no breads, no between-meal options that haven’t been carefully selected such as whole fruit, no boxes of cereal, etc. The daughter is eating enough food over the daily allotment to put on all that weight, and in another year or so there won’t be the same opportunity to be in close control of her eating, so I would certainly talk to the mother now about being very strict at home. It’s a perfect time to teach the daughters about owning their own health and nutrition. It sounds like she’s done a good job so far of not berating them for being overweight, and she’s in a very good position to really have an impact on their weight and attitudes.
I just don’t know, needscoffee. My sister ain’t stupid. She’s got eyes. And she’s eight years older than me. I have no kids and have never had to battle with over-weightedness.
Where do I come off giving anyone a lecture on how to raise their children?
I mean, it’s obvious that something needs to change and that my sister, if she isn’t doing anything, needs to do something. But I can’t imagine me saying something unsolicited without it provoking a negative reaction. We’re all cool but my siblings and I pretty much function in a MYOB kind of way.
If I caught my sister beating them over the head with a baseball bat, I would surely say and do something. Because being beaten is unhealthy. But I feel that this is different, even though being fat is also unhealthy.
Honestly, did you even read DSeid’s links? This kind of controlling behavior is exactly what is needed to drive the girls into full-fledged eating disorders that will last them a lifetime.
Perhaps instead, you could try How to Get Your Kid to Eat, But Not Too Much or Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family, both of which do a good job of helping parents set up a food-friendly environment. I’ll even sign on to the “no between-meal options” - but only when there is a planned schedule of food and snacks. But forbidding kids to have second helpings is a good way to set them up to eat everything in sight without paying any attention to whether they’re hungry or not.
CP, I guess we see a very different slice of American parenthood. Of course we agree that parents have a responsibility to try to help their children grow up as healthy, both physically and emotionally, as possible. And perhaps leaving there is best.
monstro, I would disagree about that. First off I do not see more fat acceptance, and I’ve never seen kids standing out as the fat kid, or being picked on, as doing any good at motivating positive change. (In fact there is a fair amount of research that shows that teasing contributes to later obesity and of course to various adverse mental health measures.) What I do see is more girls in particular of all BMIs, including BMI’s under historic 50%ile for age height and gender, who come in convinced that they are fat. Girls of all BMI’s are comparing themselves not to their peers, but to images in the media, images that often portray girls and women who have BMI’s that are clinically underweight. So they “diet”. And paradoxically early dieting predicts both future eating disorders and future obesity. And it seems to be more a causation than a mere correlation: dieting fosters the very habits that predispose to both. (And of course many parents who want to “do something” will encourage their children to diet, or even put their kids on one, and cause harm in the process.)
My strongly held personal opinion is that we need less focus on the weight and the BMI, other than as a marker that flags individuals for whom we need to investigate nutrition and exercise choices a bit more comprehensively. The goal has to be the behaviors for their own sake, not merely as a means to attempt to achieve being thin. FWIW.
needscoffee, once again, excessive attempts to control will backfire. And while I know that is not what you are intending, what you suggest is that: parents deciding what is the right portion size and no seconds no matter what, not only does not work, it is teaching a child to not pay attention to internal satiety cues, something they need to learn to do (as opposed to eating because it is there, or because it tastes good, or for any external motivation). The alternative is to encourage small initial servings and allow one or more additional servings provided the child has waited ideally twenty minutes (at least five) and consciously asked him or herself if (s)he is really still hungry first. Contract with the child to make no more than three concrete health improving behavior changes at a time and have a non-food award if those behaviors are sustained for some agreed upon time. The award is not based on what the scale says, it is based on the behaviors.
monstro, of course you cannot come in and lecture her, like you are some expert, but haven’t family members expressed concern to you about your underweight? Is there a way to broach the subject not as someone telling her what to do, but as someone politely expressing concern? Certainly your own experiences in trying to gain weight would likely give you some empathy for how difficult making changes is.
(On preview, thanks ENugent for reinforcing some of the the points.)
DSeid, do you see a correlation between the increase of fat teens and the increase of underweight teens? As in, “I don’t want to look like that, so…” That’s what the super-skinny girls I teach say. It’s usually something like, “People eat too much…Americans are too fat…I don’t want to look like _____,” etc.
Or do you think it’s a reaction to media and lifestyle? Because obese kids are often cited as the victims of media and lifestyle.
Also, I don’t believe that tackling a child’s weight/food problem is going to result in an eating disorder. Being a raving jerk about it may, though.
Something I learned today: Apparently there’s a possible connection between IQ and diet.
I’m not seeing an increase in underweight teens and am not aware of any data that suggests there is one. Eating disorders are another thing, and yes, it is my belief (supported by the literature) that distorted media images contribute body image dissatisfaction which contributes to the incidence of both eating disorders and obesity. (Underweight and eating disorder are obviously not the same thing.)
Tackling a child’s unhealthy nutrition and exercise habits (which are becoming manifest as a weight problem) in a wise fashion is not going to cause worse obesity or an eating disorder; doing such wisely can prevent both. Doing it foolishly might. Some parents do stupid things with the best of intentions. “Sarah, I will give you $5 for every pound you lose over the next two months.” “Johnny, you need to be on a diet. This is your serving and no seconds no matter if you are hungry or not. You need to lose weight!” Tackling a child’s weight problem, rather than their nutrition and exercise problem, is the first step to doing it stupidly. IMHO.
The OP actually mentioned several things that her sister does:
It’s also clear that the kids are active and don’t spend all day on the couch playing video games or anything. This doesn’t sound to me like a scenario where the kids get to do anything they want and the parents don’t care at all.
You don’t think there’s a difference between a chubby teen and a 400 pound 12 year old? At what BMI exactly do you think that kids should be removed from their parents?
The problem is that you’re looking at a kid with one bad cavity and reacting as if all their teeth were rotting out of their head. Or looking at kids who do brush and floss but regularly get cavities anyways and declaring that they should be removed from their parents because obviously the parents are neglectful and useless.
Just because a kid has health issues doesn’t mean the parent doesn’t care or isn’t trying. Sure, it *could *mean that, but some people are just naturally inclined towards certain issues. Unfortunately weight issues are highly associated with self-esteem and self-worth since being overweight is seen as a terrible personal failure in a way that other health issue aren’t. I’m not saying that a parent shouldn’t do anything, but I am saying that it is not a problem with a simple solution, and there are many ways a parent could make the problem worse.
Is that what I said? 
Where did I say I supported removing kids on the basis of their BMI? Are we reading the same thread?
Cite?
Yeah, that’s what I said.
Read what I wrote again. The kid is already obese, presumably in about 5th grade. No snack foods should be kept in the house, meaning breads, crackers, chips, twinkies, cakes, or other options that haven’t been carefully selected such as whole fruit, etc., good choices. If there isn’t a bunch of crap to choose from, then she will have to eat the good food between meals instead. I never said no food at all.
You want her to have seconds of dinner so as not to be a controlling type of parent? What will she be asking for seconds of, the vegetables, or the starch? When you go to a restaurant, you’re served a plated portion. Do you demand seconds if it’s not enough? We’re talking about an obese kid. She doesn’t get to eat as much food as she wants for dinner, she can eat a normal portion, which is plenty of food. (Unless the mom wants to give her a too-small portion and then seconds if requested, so she feels like she’s having more food that way.) Many families do not serve meals family-style, they dish their kids up to make sure they’re getting the right amounts of everything. Nobody’s going to go hungry. If your dog is overweight, do you let it eat as much as it wants, or do you give it a set amount? The kid is already obese and needs to lose weight, not be given seconds to make her feel good.
Just in case: