The Reuters articleBrown Eyed Girl linked to should dispel any notion the parents were providing a safe environment for their son, or that they were invested in his health and well-being.
The social workers tasked with the decision to add this kid to the already bloated CPS system must be dumbfounded and disenchanted that “excess resources” has been added to the list of causes of neglect.
That Reuters article has lots of relevant information. It mentions the kid only lost weight during a hospital stay.
The thing that strikes terror in the hearts of parents is having their child taken from them, but another way of looking at it is as a fat camp or something. I went off to camp for a couple weeks at a time at that age. Spending time away from the home and mom isn’t by itself all that destructive to kids’ psyches. In this case. the foster situation was in a nearby neighborhood, mom had visitation and evidently kept in close contact with her kid so it’s not like the kid was abandoned into a nightmarish orphanage environment or something, never to bond with mom again. Even if the foster care ends up being long-term, it’s still not quite the same as mom being sent off to prison or something. Lots of parents send their kids off to boarding schools too.
Which doctors dealing with fat (or handicapped) children see quite often. It means that it’s not a metabolism or endocrinological issue - the child is able to loose weight; since he gains it back at home, that means the problems are at home. Therefore, removal from home is the solution.
Most kids may be like that, but not all are. I wasn’t. My mother had to force me to go outside, and when she did, I just read a book on the porch. Even before I could read, I looked at picture books on the sidewalk.
I’m not saying I never wanted to run around and play, but it wasn’t very often. Probably the only reason I wasn’t much overweight was that I didn’t have a very big appetite, and my mother cooked well. I did gain 20 lbs one year and the doctor told me it was bad, so I ate a bit less. I’ve been slightly overweight but nowhere near obese all my life. (65 inches, 150 lbs now)
And I never learned to ride a bike. I had one, but couldn’t get the hang of it. (I’m in my 40s now)
I don’t see how one can read that article and come out of it thinking this doesn’t rise to the level of neglect.
200 lbs, dear Og! I can’t picture a 200 lb 8 year old. I am an overweight 41 yo and I am nowhere near the vicinity of 200 lb. It’s unfathomable that she didn’t do anything when he was just “chubby”, let alone get to a 60-lb gain in a year.
BTW, for those fearing a slippery slope: what percentage of kids is this obese? I very much doubt it’s a problem in the general population, not yet though.
Now I know it’s definitely abuse. What parent would load a child with a 100 lb barbell weight when he is at home? Only in hospital, away from his parents is he allowed to loose that weight, and instantaneously, he loses 100 lbs.
Well, to be fair, unfortunately I wasn’t able to learn to ride my bike until I was oh, ten or eleven? But that was only because there was no place for me to ride it before we moved, except for a really broken up patio. 
But with my friends helping me out, I learned in one day. After that, we were constantly going out and riding.
And I did do my fair share of sitting around – I liked to read, to draw, to play Barbies and watch TV. But like I said, I was a scrawny kid and I’ve fortunately been blessed with a fairly fast metabolism. Still, even if I wasn’t, you’d have to really WORK at becoming 219 lbs at eight-years-old.
Jesus Christ. So much for the “one Twinkie”.
while a twinkie is considered the iconic waste of calories it is far from the top of the list of bad things to eat. A single muffin from Dunkin Donuts has far more calories and it looks so innocent in comparison.
To recap my position, I’ve shown how few calories it takes to add weight. We’ve talked about the differences between what he should weigh and what he currently weighs. It is substantial to us but that is his base mark calorie intake. He is not going to stop eating 1/3 of what he is consuming without experiencing an extreme hunger drive. It doesn’t take much to eat 2000 calories a day.
I am as appalled at his weight as anybody else is but there are an infinite number of reasons to take kids away if we go down this slippery slope. Even if the court picks a specific BMI index from which to trigger such an event it opens up a huge can of worms for the idea of taking kids for one reason or another. The standard of imminent danger is pretty muddy here. Clearly the child has long term problems but he was not in imminent danger. A more appropriate intervention would have been to enroll the child and both parents in a cooking/nutrition course.
The parents kept missing the scheduled appointments. The kid couldn’t breath because of “extra skin around his throat”. If they can’t be arsed to take the kid in for a serious medical problem then yeah, they’re failing as parents.
Jesus Christ, he can hardly breath, they’d better not just assume that a muffin is “innocent”. They should be watching like hawks at this point.
And 2000 calories is, IIRC, the adult average. I’d rather my kid be experiencing “extreme hunger pains” (because he’s no longer stuffing himself like a hog) than wheezing to death. Fuck.
In this case “one muffin” is not innocent, and it takes a hell of a lot more than just “one muffin”. Again, laws of physics? And once again, if one muffin is bad for him, then THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE THAT KIND OF CRAP IN THE HOUSE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Don’t buy all that junk food if you’re having a problem with the kid. He’s not going to starve if he can’t have Little Debbie. Let him eat some carrots or something if he’s that hungry.
I’m not disagreeing with what you’ve said but unless he’s tethered to a parent he has the ability to forage. imagine having 1/3 of your calories cut off. The food doesn’t have to be in the house. He can get it from his school mates and he’s gong to be HUNGRY.
The mother’s theory is that obesity “runs in the family.” I gather everyone in the household is at least overweight, so I’m guessing this kid isn’t going to be snacking on celery & carrot sticks at home. Ain’t gonna happen, unless they’ve been deep-fried and hidden under 3 lbs of cheese.
So what? When I was in high school, I didn’t want to sit in class. I wanted to go mess around with my boyfriend. I was BORED and HORNY. And there were no fences around the school. I went to class on my own and could easily just not go.
But if I did skip class frequently, damn right CPS would be on my Mom’s ass. So she did what it took to make sure I wasn’t skipping class.
This kid will feel hungry in his life. He needs to learn to manage that feeling in a way that doesn’t harm him.
Not just the physical effects of obesity, but kids are cruel do you really believe that this poor kid is NOT being tormented by the rest of the kids in school? Any tiny difference and it is a hen’s pecking party. Imagine the psychological damage being done to him.
True, although 12% of his classmates are seriously obese, and another large percent are probably overweight, so it’s not like obese kids don’t have a large peer group these days.
Just to remind you, *you *brought up the twinkie first, suggesting all the child had to do to gain weight was eat an extra twinkie. Several people pointed out how wrong that was. Now, it’s a single DD muffin? Well, yes, you are correct that Dunkin Donuts muffins have significantly more calories than a twinkie (and, in some cases, a heck of a lot more nutrients). But even at 650 calories a pop, you cannot justify his weight gain by a single muffin.
The boy is eating more than 780 calories over a child of normal weight and if when he’s gaining is considerably more than that. For the umpteenth time, he is consuming a LOT more food than he should be. And if he’s eating the complete crap that’s marketed to kids like pizza rolls and Little Debbies --not much of anything other than but sugar, salt and fat-- he’s likely missing very important nutrients that will further damage his health.
You haven’t shown anything other than you don’t understand math. He is eating not only far more than his peers, but far more than he even needs to maintain his weight. At a certain point, he’s not eating because he’s hungry but because he has a compulsion to eat. He will consume food whether he needs it or not. He is not going to starve by reducing his current caloric intake by 4000-5000 calories per week. If he’s ravenous on this diet, it’s because he’s been overdependent on carbohydrates and his blood sugar is out of whack.
This is why it’s so very important for a responsible person – he’s a child, you must know where this is going – to step in and control his food intake. His medical team placed him on a nutrition plan. The responsible person in his life failed to keep him on that plan. The consequences of failing to keep him on a sensible nutrition plan with the ultimate goal of returning the child to a normal weight include admitting him to the hospital for two weeks due to severe breathing problems. It’s a simple case of medical neglect. The court didn’t remove him just because his BMI was too high, it removed him due to his home environment being inhospitable to his medical recovery. You keep ignoring the fact that CPS was involved with the family for over a year.
The slippery slope here is that if you cannot manage to raise your children in a way that does not cause them to develop preventable, life-threatening illnesses *and *you ignore your child’s serious medical needs that exacerbates those life-threatening illnesses, you are not fit to parent. When mom started missing appointments and failed to adhere to the child’s nutrition plan, she demonstrated that she wasn’t motivated to ensure her child’s health improved. Hopefully, this is a wake-up call for her and she begins to realize she must start acting like a parent and parent.
Don’t attack me for this because I’m not actually suggesting it, I’m merely wondering if it would be an option. There are surgical weight loss procedures which are reversible like, I think, the lap-band. Would that be wholly inappropriate on a child his age? I have no idea what the ramifications would be, I just had the idea and wondered if it was a potential way to get the kid down to a weight where he could learn to function normally, then have it reversed…
He’ll be hungry. Okay, but so what? One of the most startling things I’ve ever read written by someone who lost a lot of weight was that she eventually realized that normal weight people get hungry too, but they just accept it rather than do anything to avoid it. Being hungry is normal. We’re supposed to get hungry and learn to cope with it. It seems kinder to encourage him to learn that lesson now, while his body is more capable of bouncing back than hope he will when he’s my age and weight loss and habit changes are much harder.
What surgical procedures work without a change in habits? Most surgical procedures have a comparitivly high failure rate because people find a way to cheat (which is psychologically wired into the system - we don’t want to accept rules from other people) - e.g. when the stomach is stapled shut to a tiny pouch, people start drinking high-calorie milk shakes from McD, and keep weight. Or they slowly eat a little bit more, until the stomach extends so much that the staples are useless. Why would a band help better?
Considering that an endocrinologist and other specialists have looked at him, and again, that he lost weight during his hospital stay, this shows the root cause: the mother is in denial (probably because she’s also overweight, to believe it “runs in the family”), and rather than face complaints from the family by stocking only carrots, she falls back on “well I’m helpless” self-denial.
Well, the surgery I had (duodenal switch) is pretty hard to cheat with, but it’s also not really reversable and I don’t think anyone would do it on an 8 year old (or should). At 8 though, his parents should be able to limit his ability to cheat by, say, getting milkshakes. I mean what 8 year old has his own access to milkshakes? I just think that if he weighed closer to what he should way, it might be easier to maintain that than working off all the weight first, and then maintaining. Like I said, just something I wondered about. I haven’t considered all sides of the issue and don’t know if it would be a good idea or not.