You could make the same statement about a teenager and cigarettes and be equally unsuccessful in your endeavors. In this case, the non-working, non-driving 8 year old was able to obtain calories from playmates and siblings who don't understand why Timmy can't have a snack.
If I were under investigation by CPS I’d hire a lawyer and a psychiatrist and get an injunction.
Siblings and playmates that were giving him thousands and thousands of calories, daily? :dubious:
If your eight year old was sneaking from your liquor cabinet, you’d sure as hell find a way to lock that up, right? You wouldn’t throw up your hands and say “I just can’t keep him from knocking back shots of whiskey!” Now, liquor is everywhere. Most of his friends houses probably have liquor. You may even have it unsecured- a six pack in the fridge, a bottle of win on the counter. But if your third grader developed a liquor problem, you would find a way to control that pronto. And if his brother was slipping him rum cocktails, you would put an end to that, right?
If you are capable of keeping an eight year old from drinking liquor, you can keep him from consuming a dangerous amount of calories.
Excellent analogy
Except they don’t have to give him thousands of calories a day. He’s in a catch 22 because of his weight. He’s too obese to do any meaningful exercise so one extra twinkie a day is enough for him to gain weight over a year.
Siblings and friends don’t have the same access to liquor as they do to a handful of empty calories nor are they likely to steal liquor as they are a cookie.
The mother has a track record of working with the doctor and reducing the child’s weight.
What got me is that they got him a bike as a way of exercise. When I was a kid, I got a bike for my birthday. And then later on when I was older and had outgrown that one, I got a bigger one. A bike was something you wanted. You weren’t forced to ride a bike to lose weight.
That’s the one thing I miss most about being a kid: that endless supply of energy you have. It seemed like I was always out playing with my friends, riding our bikes, or playing ball, or just running around or whatever. I’m not saying I didn’t watch TV, or sit and read a book, or play with my toys. But damn, what kid liked to sit constantly all the fucking time and never liked to go outside and run around and play?
And when I DID watch TV, I was flopping on the sofa, huffing and puffing under my own mass.
What about the psychological AND physical damage that this kid will go through from being 200 fucking pounds at eight years old???
Jesus. What do you want CPS to do? They worked with this family for almost two goddamned years. Your solution seems to be, oh well, they can’t help it, the kid’s too fat, he’s going to eat anyways, his sibs will sneak him food, so let’s just give up. Fuck that.
And Saint Cad, good luck to you. It sounds like you guys are good parents.
You and I lived in a different world. When I was 5 I rode my bike to school. Today parents line up around the block to drop off and pick up their kids. Frisbees can’t compete against computer games. Bikes can’t compete against electric scooters.
I flat wore out a number of bikes. I loved riding them, fixing them, painting them… I easily averaged 100 miles every time I rode in the summer. The journey was an adventure complete with traced maps and travel guide info picked up while traveling with my parents or previous rides. You’re lucky if you can get a kid to spend 30 minutes on an off-road trail with a mountain bike. And that will require some kind of ipod so they don’t get bored and a phone so they can text their friends.
What do overweight people do when they’re stressed out? EAT. This is an 8 year old child that is being taken from his home and his family for the crime of being fat. Mommy’s crying, his dad is in an animated discussion with a bureaucrat who probably couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel, and a bunch of strangers are dragging him away to be with other strangers. He’s already made to feel like shit because he’s fat and now all this turmoil is HIS fault.
I would expect social services to provide the same human resources that they would for a severely autistic child. This would give the parents a break and keep the family together.
Even if they did, I promise you, if your eight year old developed a drinking problem you would do what it takes to make sure he wasn’t taking shots behind your back.
sure but you’re bumping up the bar to make a point. What if he was trying to kill other kids or selling meth.
His crime is that he wants a cookie every day.
I am not.
I don’t doubt your intent and willingless to do everything you can to avoid your child behaving in harmful ways.
The issue is that you may not know how.
Even if psychology is a relatively new science - when it’s not diminished to snake oil salesmen on popular media - we do know why children behave the way they do most of the time, when their behavior is so far from the expected average.
Overeating could also be a symptom of a mental dysfunction, but in that case it would be obvious to a trained professional.
My point is, biking is FUN. I still see kids who like to ride bikes and play sports. (And just run around and play in general).
Oh bullshit. He’s EIGHT. He is not the one cooking dinner, he’s not the one controlling his diet – his PARENTS are. They’re the ones who are in charge of his nutritional needs. Unlike Saint Cad, they haven’t seemed to have made an effort.
Completely unrelated, as autistism is a genetic trait – you cannot cause someone to become autistic, nor can it be cured. Obesity (and this kid is not just fat, he’s morbidly obese, to the point he’s having trouble breathing), is under their control. They worked with the parents for almost two years. Yes, he lost some weight, but obviously it wasn’t working.
The mother keeps crying about how she loves her child – well, sometimes “love” means you have to do what’s best for him. And if living in a different home is what’s best, then well, that’s what has to be done. And it was just a case of “his weight was fluxuating”, he was gaining it back very quickly, because his siblings were sneaking him food, and Mom couldn’t put a stop to it.
This time it wasn’t about the “crime of being fat”. He’s almost three times my size and I’m 33. SOMETHING needs to be done, and it seems like Mom and Dad weren’t doing it.
(BTW, is there any medication in the works for Prader-Wilis?)
Do you have a cite for this statement? I hadn’t read that he’s unable to walk.* If he can walk, he can engage in exercise that will burn calories. If he can’t there is modified exercise, such as pool work, that can be done. I’ve seen personally witnessed the morbidly obese exercising. But you can also see it on Biggest Loser.
*Although, if he at that point in which he is unable to walk, I’d say that the intervention is even more critical.
Again, cite? What’s a “track record”?
They said that he was visibly winded after climbing a flight of stairs. I speak as someone who was at one point morbidly obese and I can tell you from my own experience that exercise when you’re really heavy is extremely difficult. After I lost all of my weight I went to pick up my dog and put him on the couch. The dog weighed 125lbs. I had lost about that much weight. I could barely lift the dog–he was too heavy. Then I realized that until I lost the weight, I’d been essentially carrying the equivalent of my huge dog every minute of every day, everywhere I went. Try putting on a hundred or more extra pounds and then doing your regular exercises. It’s hard. And I bet as an 8 year old he doesn’t have the cognitive skills yet to understand why he needs to work so hard to exercise. It’s probably like pulling teeth to get the kid to exercise. They should get him into swimming or something–that’s a lot more level playing field for an obese person, and it’s great exercise in all areas.
I am not bumping up anything. My point is, if you really want to control an eight year old’s access to any given substance, you can. There are kids who suffer diseases that make sunlight and water dangerous to them, and their parents figure it out. If they can figure out how to keep their kid from ever glimpsing the sun, you sure as hell can keep your kid from downing entire pizzas.
This idea that “I can’t control what he eats! His brother gives him cookies” is utter bullshit. If it was important to you, you’d find a way.
Question – would this kid be a candidate for weight-loss surgery?
I had thought of that, too, but he’s so young I don’t know what the risks are for bariatric surgery. I think you might have a hard time getting a surgeon to perform it. Of the surgeries though, I would recommend the duodenal switch (www.duodenalswitch.com) because there are far, far fewer post-surgery restrictions and after a couple of years you can essentially eat normally again without regaining your weight. Most of the others, such as gastric bypass, still require a lot of self-restraint to make sure they don’t eat the wrong things or too much of anything or the pouch stretches out and the weight comes back. It may be hard for an 8 year old to be able to stick to the rules.
As far as siblings passing him cookies–where did the cookies come from? If the parents don’t keep cookies in the house, the problem is gone, right? Just keep healthy, low calorie food in the house, possibly put locks on the fridge, pantry, etc (extreme but maybe necessary).
I never said exercise wasn’t hard. It’s *supposed *to be hard, otherwise it’s not exercise. I indicated that if he’s even the least bit mobile (and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he isn’t) to claim exercise is impossible is overstating things. I would imagine that in order for a proper weight loss program to work, it would behoove the patient (or in this case, his caretaker) to monitor his nutrition (caloric input) and exercise (caloric expenditure) while accounting for any special nutritional needs (i.e., moderate sugar or sodium to balance blood sugar/pressure) with especially keen focus. It would seem, though, the mother is not only unable to fulfill that need, she failed to keep the child from further weight gain. The boy needs a healthier environment, at least until his weight gets down to healthier ranges, but Mom needs an education as well.
Oh no. Not the “extra Twinkie every day” excuse. No one was sneaking this kid an extra Twinkie. Two large pizzas, maybe. But a single Twinkie? Come on now.
It’s difficult for me to be judgmental against the mother, not knowing the full picture. It could be that she did everything in her power to help this kid and it just didn’t work. Believe it or not, sometimes you can try your hardest and still fail.
I can’t speak to this particular case, whether it’s appropriate for this child to be removed, etc, but I can offer our personal experience as a comparison of sorts. My step-daughter was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes at age 8. Up until two or so years ago, my husband and his ex-wife prompted all of her sugar checks, and double-checked the amount of insulin, etc., but by the age of 12, she had shown that she could be trusted with some of her own diabetes care and they slacked a little. Well, as is pretty normal for diabetic kids, she rebelled a bit after being given that responsibility and her health worsened because of it. After lying about her sugar levels for a month or two, she ended up in the ICU at Riley Children’s Hospital and we were told that we had a couple of months to get her A1C test results under control, and if we didn’t that she’d be put in foster care with someone who could.
Obviously, that threat scared us all to death and we spent the next few months watching everything she ate, every sugar check, every insulin injection, back to the way we did when she was much littler. It annoyed her to no end, but the idea of her going to foster care was enough that we weren’t going to take any risks. And here we are almost two years later, she’s doing great and her A1C results have been in the normal range ever since that hospital visit. It was all we needed to get tough on her. And yeah, that was a hard summer, she had to be supervised at every turn, but there just wasn’t an option of NOT monitoring her like that.
Now, I’m not sure that she would have actually been put into foster care if her A1C hadn’t improved, but that’s the sort of threat I take seriously, regardless of how realistic it really was. So, I agree with Even Sven’s comments about how it doesn’t matter how hard it is, when your child has a serious medical condition and you are threatened with losing him/her because of it you damn well drop everything and get it under control. And having some experience with CPS because of issues related to my daughter’s autism, I also know that it’s not like they take children from home unless it’s beyond hope. I’m willing to stretch it that it might not be exactly the same in Ohio, but I still don’t think they remove children without what they see as a very good reason.
So yeah, I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt on a case like this, at least until more information comes to light.
I walk 7 miles a day over the course of 8 hrs. Over the last 3 months I lost 10 lbs. I’m not in the same BMI category as the child by any stretch and this is a physical challenge for me. I doubt a seriously obese child can walk that much. The child in question did indeed lose that amount of weight so it’s safe to say the program he was on for diet and exercise worked.
He’s only 8. A track record is accomplishing a goal of losing weight within a reasonable amount of time. He will be tasked with this goal his entire life and it’s going to have it’s ups and downs. Oprah could better explain the difficulties of losing weight and she can afford the very best dietitian and exercise coach on the planet. It’s not an easy task for a child who doesn’t understand why that extra twinkie sneaked to him each day is harmful. It’s just a snack the other kids eat that is denied to him. He’s a little boy with a sweet tooth, not Al Capone.
To reduce his weight he has to eat LESS than the other kids. So yes, it’s potentially an extra twinkie a day to the child which really amounts to multiple twinkies given the need to consume less than the other kids.