I read this whole thread just to make an anecdotal aside. Foster parents are not paid much for their troubles (usually enough to feed and house the kids). That means they take on as many kids as possible.
Most that I have met (and I have met some very good ones) need to skimp on the food budget to make ends meet. That means that the kids eat junk. I really hope the foster parents in this case are getting enough money to get good, healthy food for this kid.
Anecdote: when our kids moved in from foster care, the foster mom told us everything about their home but would not share what the kids ate despite me begging to know. It wasn’t until my son and I were grocery shopping and he pointed out all sorts of pre-packaged foods that I realized what they were eating there. It was pretty sad.
Nope. On my side, I have CDC nutrition and exercise recommendations and BMI guidelines. I have Ohio CPS and the medical staff who treated this kid, as well as a handful of posters here who support acting in the interest of this child’s health rather than leaving him in a neglectful house where his health has continued to decline. You may not care for my responses, but you have my guarantee that if a child in my classroom is 150 pounds overweight and struggling to breathe, I will act, just as I would if I saw a severly malnourished child, a bruised child, or any other clearly visible signs of neglect or abuse. And a mother’s proclamations of love will not sway me from acting in the best interest of a child.
You and I have reached an impasse, that’s for sure.
I think this self-righteous screed points out one of the differences between us: you impute positive motivations to yourself (and those who agree with you) and are quite incapable of appreciating that those who disagree may have positive motives, too. Hence the otherwise-bizzare assertion that those who disagree with you must be “fat apologists”, and the constant overwrought emotionalism and exaggeration of the facts.
I think there is a quite legitimate and reasonable debate to be had about the proper limits of state intervention that could be raised by the facts of this case, but I dispair about having it in this atmosphere.
This child was not placed in foster care because he is fat. The 13% of kids who are severely overweight are not going to be put in foster care for being fat.
He was placed in foster care because he has a medical condition, which happens to be obesity, and his family is making no attempt to control that condition- which is this case is functionally the same as exacerbating that condition.
When CPS sets out conditions for a family, they generally do not shoot very high. They generally set very achievable milestones for families to reach. This family had a year to meet these conditions, and they did not.
He is already suffering an entirely reversible, entirely preventable, extremely uncomfortable illness caused by his condition, which is controlled through the use of a fairly invasive, uncomfortable and inconvenient piece of equipment. This alone is a concern. If a kid has a preventable chronic disease, the parents need to be taking measures to prevent that disease. You don’t take your pre-diabetic kid and tell him to eat whatever he wants because he can can just control the diabetes with insulin.
whoa. That is not an accurate assessment of the situation. The mother was following the prescribed treatment over the last year and the child lost weight. He also gained it back and then some. He’s an 8 year eating machine with no self control and his siblings have gotten contraband calories past the warden.
People, like myself, who have grown up with foster kids and who have regular contact with the child welfare system know that is not an inherently bad organization but that it is severely overburdened, underfunded and in need of dramatic reform in many aspects. It’s not a place you want to place a child in if there is any way around having that child in the system
Those of us who are skeptical of this removal are not skeptical because we think that a child weighing 3x what he should is ok. There is no agenda of advocating for obesity or any other type of “secret” reason that has been alleged. Rather, we are skeptical when the power of an agency that already does not function very well is being expanded. There are extremely serious negative outcomes of foster care placement. Teaching a parent a lesson, serving as a wake-up call or temporarily changing behavior that needs to change in its native environment are not legitimate reasons to justify placement outside of the home.
There may be mitigating information that surrounds this case that means that removal is necessary. However, I haven’t seen it, and neither have a few others who have participated in this thread.
For those of you who don’t see some of the problems within the child welfare system, I urge you to take time and review this story (released tonight) from ABC News: World News Tonight With David Muir - ABC News
For those saying they shouldn’t, think of this. 200 pounds is big for a fully grown man. This kid is EIGHT. That is not healthy. Who lets their kid get that obese in just eight years? As a newborn, was he eating mushy twinkies instead of baby food? Drinking beer instead of milk?
I adopted out of the foster system. You get to know a lot of people.
My kids were removed for neglect. That is probably clouding my judgement here.
However, while the child was removed, I find it highly unlikely that he will not be going back once the parents have shown that they can manage his condition. I find it even less likely that the parents won’t see this as the wake up call that I suspect CPS is intending it to be. CPS’ goal is to keep kids with their parents (or at least here it is) and they have to show that they are not able to care for this kid for him to be removed permanently.
200 lbs for an eight-year-old is beyond overweight and merely obese. That’s pretty severe. To give you an example, my dad is sixty-two, he’s 6.3, and even HE doesn’t weight 200lbs!
Unless he’s like 6.2 and a pro-athlete, that’s fucking morbidly obese. Now, should the kid be taken from his home? Yeah, I’d say so.
And he didn’t just have sleep apnea – he had sleep apnea so severe he had to be on a breathing machine. That’s not normal for a fucking eight-year-old.
Wasn’t there a case several years ago about a thirteen-year-old girl who was upwards of five hundred+ pounds and when she died her mother was charged with neglect? (I believe they found out she couldn’t even walk after awhile, and that she had feces in the folds of her skin)
(When I was eight, I was about somewhere in the fifties, I think. I was a pretty scrawny kid.)
I totally agree with Guin here. And while I don’t remember how much I weighed at various points in my childhood, I do remember that I was one of the taller kids in the class until 6th grade–I stood in the back row for school photos and stuff like that. That was as tall as I ever got–6th grade. Sad.
As for morbid obesity, I know what it’s like to be there. During my pregnancy (actually, from month 4-9) I gained 60lbs. Then in the next two years, I gained 60 more pounds. At 5’2" I ended up at 235lbs. That’s a BMI of 43, which is well into “morbid obesity.” It can sneak up on you, I’ll give you that. But I was 100% responsible for both what I ate and my activity level. As a stay-home mom I spent a lot of time sitting around and not doing anything–and that’s after my pre-pregnancy job of dancing for 6 hours/day–so I went from a metabolism that was used to LOTS of activity to NO activity. I take full responsibility for my weight gain. And sadly, after trying everything else, it took surgery to lose the weight for me.
A child, however, has limited access to food. It may be hard to force an 8 year old to do physical activity, but it’s possible. Take the kid for a walk every day and build up his cardiovascular strength, for one thing. And LIMIT that kid’s FOOD. And control what kinds of food he eats! My problem was that I made the mistake the many vegetarians make and replaced my proteins with carbs because it was easy. As a parent of a 16 year old I still control what he eats (except at school, which I’ve mentioned before and I won’t hijack this thread to complain about). If the food isn’t in the house, he can’t eat it. If we don’t have junk food in the house, he can’t eat it. If the only options for snacking he has are healthy choices such as raw vegetables or something, then that’s what he’ll snack on. You can put a lock on the fridge. You can make stricter rules (8 year olds will usually follow strict “you’re not allowed” type rules–they are still at the age when they think their parents are all-knowing!). Childhood obesity, except in those very few situations where the kid has a metabolic disorder or something, is TOTALLY avoidable. I put the fault 100% on the parents for this in almost every case. The parents are modeling poor nutrition, providing poor nutrition, allowing excessive snacking, etc. If it gets to the levels of the kid in the OP, it’s totally within the scope of CPS to step in and do something.
Ok, so maybe the first foster home won’t actually improve the kid’s situation, but a little more work on CPS’s part and they can find a home that will put appropriate restrictions on the kid’s eating and feed the kid the right foods, and the kid WILL lose weight. While the kid is in foster care, maybe the parents can be taking courses on nutrition or something so that they can one day get the kid back in their custody.
I’m on record (see my previous link in this thread) as saying that extreme childhood obesity should be considered child abuse. It’s HARD to lose that much weight as an adult. Like I said–for me it took surgery. I tried everything else and wasn’t strong enough to do it. Many people just end up living their whole lives obese. That’s no way to live. There are so many physical and psychological side effects. If you’ve never been obese it’s hard to relate and realize how big the problem is, I am sure. But having been there, I can say that it’s a SHIT way to live. And the older you get, the harder it is to lose the weight. At 8, he still has a shot at it. He’s still growing. He’s got that teen growth spurt ahead of him, which can help. He’s not in charge of his own food, though, which is the important part. That isn’t possible as an adult.
ETA: my own son is 16, 5’5", and about 105lbs. He’s a beanpole. In fact, he should probably weigh a little more. But the way we’ve raised him, he will call me at work to ask if he can have a snack rather than just helping himself. It’s possible to set up rules that kids will follow regarding food.
To those who are against this ruling because the foster care system is not perfect, but problematic:
what are you suggesting instead? Do you have a third alternative between “bad foster care” and “neglectful parent ignoring a medical problem”?
In real life, the difficult choice is not between what is right and what is wrong, but between one bad choice and another bad choice.
Letting the kid stay with his mother while his medical problems grow worse is not a better solution just because foster care sucks. (This is called the utopia fallacy, where every solution that isn’t 100% perfect is rejected, instead of working towards a better solution step by step.).
And improving foster care should be easier than improving parents, because you can select and train foster parents better - if they don’t cooperate with your expectations, they are dropped from the program. And if not enough good foster parents can be found, you set up state homes - they don’t have to be Dickensian hell-holes, you can run them competent and good, too, if you make the effort.
What a clusterfuck. There is no way this kid is going to benefit from being in foster care - even if he does lose some weight. Which he probably only will if he’s treated like he’s in prison to make sure he doesn’t eat what he wants to.
I met a young, obese, compulsive overeater whose parents were not at fault, when I was a kid myself. She weighed 100 lbs as a short-for-her-age 5-year-old, and she looks like she weighs over 400 lbs as an adult (I found her on facebook recently). Yes, it’s sad. No, it was not abuse, and her parents were not at fault at all IMO - they tried to control her insatiable appetite kindly but firmly, and were unable to. This girl wanted to eat a whole large pizza herself when she was in kindergarten. She was so ‘hungry’ even after 2nds and 3rds that she stole food from my mom’s kitchen once… Some people are born with broken metabolisms.
I don’t know the situation, so I’m not prepared to say the parents could have controlled it or not, but I will say that I don’t think that every, or even most, children are like this. I think that if you start when they’re young they tend to follow rules, and if you don’t stock your house with garbage food, then your kids can’t eat garbage food, etc.
There may be obese kids out there (again, I’m not talking about ones with medical reasons for obesity) whose parents wouldn’t be at fault, but I’d say the majority are.
This is true in my experience. I am still flabbergasted that so many people are blaming CPS for this action instead of blaming a lax parent for clogging up the foster care system because she failed to enact recommended changes after one year. This is her fault, not the fault of CPS.
Has anyone here met a social worker? If not, are you at least vaguely aware at how overworked and overburdened they are? There is no pleasure in taking a child out of a home, and surely this is a landmark event: removing a child because he has too many resources. Too many resources: that’s amazing. This is akin to explaining liposuction to an 80’s era Ethiopian. “See, we have too much food, so when we overeat and don’t feel pretty anymore, we have a doctor suck some of the fat out.” The 80’s era Ethiopian would have gladly eaten the fat that we Dorito-muching Dollar menu-worshipping chunky Americans shamelessly stack on. Put yourself in the shoes of that social worker who at the end of the day had to admit “Jesus Christ, I just removed an over-nourished child from a home with too many resources.” That is the day I would burn out and write a letter of resignation, because we’ve somehow managed to add another problem to our priveleged 1st world existence. A ridiculously preventable problem, that persons in impoverished or developing areas couldn’t even comprehend.
There are children in the foster care system because their parents lacked the resources or education to feed them enough, and this mom had plenty of resources but allowed her child to stuff himself into a medical emergency. Mom alone is to blame for his placement in foster care, not CPS for their year long attempt to provide guidance, or the medical professionals who recommended intervention.
She did follow the proscribed treatment and was successful getting his weight down. He was able to sneak food and counter the gains made. Expecting an 8 year old to hold to a diet is about as easy as herding cats considering adults have a tough time doing it.
I would like to see Children’s services explain how the psychological damage this kid will go through doesn’t qualify as immediate harm to the child.
Considering that a non-working, non-driving 8 year old can only obtain the calories within his reach or via begging, it should be considerably easier to maintain an 8 year old’s diet. Tough, sure, but easier than restricting food from someone with the resources to obtain food at will.
If I were under investigation by CPS, I would diet and exercise with my child, consult every professional medical, counseling, and nutrition resource available to me for help, move mountains *and *herd cats before I would let an agency place my child in foster care.
