Is having overweight kids child abuse?

[Mummyme1987]

A friend posted on Fb that parents with fat kids are child abusers. Except for kids with medical problems. It started with comments on how it's awful that there's a generous fit section in clothes shops. I'm shocked that people think this. I think the majority of parents don't just feed their kids crap, and some kids are bigger than others, and unless it is a very extreme case it's not child abuse. Thoughts?

The thing is, the moral crusaders on this thread who set themselves up on the side of "individual responsibility" as opposed to "societal analysis" can't actually do anything, by their own admission, so they may as well shut up.

CAMP A

Individual responsibility = each person gets fat or not by their own will and societal factors are irrelevant = look after yourself then, and stop bellyaching

I'm taking a different view - I'm in CAMP B:

We live in an obesogenic society - > this is not good for a lot of people whom it affects, especially young people - > we have a collective responsibility to think about it and do something about it, as a society - > which means thinking about how traditional "common sense" fat-hassling isn't helping, and looking on a societal level at what might help, recognising that this goes beyond individuals

I'm more inclined to see CAMP A as ignoring the elephant in the room, frankly. That's old fashioned wishful thinking and isn't going to work

Except that it's the people who have taken personal responsibility for themselves and their DC's diet and exercise who haven't become overweight/had overweight children.

But hey, what do they know. They're obviously wrong saying that what has worked for them to (eg healthy diet and active lifestyle) would work for others.

HowBad I'm in mostly Camp B, with a little Camp A. Keep fighting the good fight.

Some misinformation on this thread- it might be better to have a slim nation of smokers (um, no smoking kills 2 out of 3 in an early death, whereas overweight rates are rising but so is life expectancy!) and that overweight always leads to poorer health outcomes (actually there is a well documented association between being overweight and increased longevity, not for obesity, but the two (overweight/obese) don't hold the same risks in a linear fashion at all).

Most overweight people are not 'obese' and therefore some of the claims about the ruination of society are over-exaggerated, and yet again, no-one talks about the industries who deliberately and calculatedly make their money from making us all fatter by HIDING and CHANGING the food that we eat so it is less healthy and you need a degree in nutrition to find out what's in it - and standard eating of organic vegetables not covered in chemicals and meat without added sugar water is the preserve of the rich.

Emotional eating is irrelevant when it comes to discussing whether telling parents they must do something about their fat kids. Comfort eating & eating disorders might make some fat adults over eat more, but I don't for one second believe being told your children's health and quality of life is at risk because of their lifestyle triggers the reaction of then feeding them more crap and reducing their exercise further.

And let's be honest, not every overweight person has deep seated emotional reasons or medical reasons or an eating disorder. The majority don't.

Loving the idea grays photo isn't healthy. I'm not even sure our modern stance on what constitutes a healthy size is entirely down to average size. Delusion and false confidence boosting is part of it. Because if you see the thin person as skeletal, the slim person as too thin and the chubby one as slim, you can tell yourself you are just a bit chubby. Start admitting people a lot smaller than you are a perfectly healthy and averagely slim size, and by comparison you'll have to admit you are too big.

Perhaps people in the size 18+ range who's weight has slowly crept up over the years would tackle it long before they creep further up to the morbidly obese range if they weren't constantly bombarded with the message fat is a 'real woman' and 'curvy'. And slim/ healthy thin 'prepubescent' 'androgynous' 'anorexic' etc.

Lurked, can I just check this. So - for children and their parents.... there is no emotional component to diet at all?

Do you mind me asking if you have qualifications in this area? Any background in psychiatry or psychology? Training in family services? Anything like that?

The message people are being bombarded with, which is dangerous, is "Consume".

Diet advice is being run by capitalists with something to sell so the message is "consume this." - still "consume"

In my opinion one thing that would be a good start is for everyone to stop talking about subbing this for that - which is still saying "EAT" and just STOP SELLING. If you're under 20 I reckon a lot of people could eat almost any 3 meals a day - even with chips at one of them - but including vegetables - of a reasonable size - and not be fat. IF you leave spaces between them, the rest of the time, and NOT EAT.

This is incredibly hard to do in our society. especially for young people, who tend to have poor impulse control, be very led by their peers, very susceptible to advertising messaging, and have a bit of pocket money which is probably at the spending level of cheap carbs and fast food.

I have two children who are very different in their attitudes to food. One of them is basically not interested, likes plain food best, and eats at meal times until she is full, and then stops. The other one is much more interested in food, loves cooking (she is only 5 and has more kitchen skills than the 7 year old!) loves more complex flavours, and is far more likely to ask for seconds, and eat for taste.
The way I manage their diet is that I don't offer snacks, and if they ask for one (they tend only to ask if they are genuinely hungry) I point them to the fruit bowl. They eat well at mealtimes because they haven't eaten for a few hours, so this is my chance to get them to eat what I want them to eat.

When they were younger and I used to hang out with my NCT group, I HATED the way that some of the women were always carrying "healthy" packaged (junk carb) snacks. They would give them to their own children, offer them around, and I'd find my 2 and 4 year olds were eating sugared starch half an hour before I was going to be offering them salmon and peas. One of them (the older) would then refuse the main meal which would annoy me as I would want her to have the nutrition; the other (the younger) would eat both, which is because she loves food and will eat it whenever it is offered if she can remotely squeeze it in, which isn't great.

So this is why I see this as a societal issue. I wanted to live in a society that doesn't offer junk carbs for no reason. It's a micro version of a macro issue. I can't change my children's character (the desire of one to eat the nearest, blandest thing and then stop; the desire of the other to eat almost everything in sight); I can put what I think is right on the table (salmon and peas); but I CAN'T tell other families, billboards, supermarkets, magazines, EVERYWHERE, shrieking "EAT THIS"

It's pretty obvious, AyeAmarok - as I said, I hang around with a lot of very fit people, with the lifting, and the cutting, and the evil protein farts... For a woman to have visible muscles/ab definition, they need to have a very low % body fat. Some women want to do that, some don't. I'm not hating on her, some of my best friends look rather like that. As the saying goes.

But your boobs are largely fat, so if you have a visible six-pack, you're not going to have DDs or whatever those are. Particularly squished into a sports bra, which does noone any favours.

It's a very modern look. People didn't look like that 30 years ago, or if they did, only in private

It's counter-productive - again, the artificiality (directly related to selling stuff) of a look like that works towards making healthy activity seem like a niche activity. It's the opposite of the mile-a-day-for-everyone thing; it's making looking after the body into a weird specialised niche pursuit with definite aesthetic results.

None of this has anything to do whether that individual is healthy or not, I wouldn't venture an opinion on that. but it is part of an obesogenic world that images like this are shared and commented on, as a normal woman who eats a balanced diet, walks 5 miles a day and has a BMI of 22 is probably not going to look like that - so it ghettoises exercise, makes it seem weird and specialised

This is probably what a young, healthy, reasonably active woman with a balanced diet would look like without taking part in specialised activities or extreme diets

howbad does it make you feel good to be rude to people?

All the society changes will not make a difference of individuals don't take responsibility too.

Or should we tax 'bad' food so high only the richest can afford it? That's not going to happen.

Your Camps are wrong. No one has said there is nothing that can be done above individual level or that we just have to wait and hope people wake up. Only that while society can change, individuals have to too. What you eat eat is your decision. In the case of children, their parents decision.

People like you that want to shut down discussions are only making it worse. some parents may not realise the damaging effect they are having on their child while being over weight or the extent it an go to. Because no one is allowed to discuss it. If it was discussed in the same way as passive smoking and the way that can damage your children. May be some people would realise how bad it is.

But you can't have a campaign about childhood obesity because people shout 'fat shaming'. Does anyone ever talk about 'smoker shaming' and ask people to stop discussing it?

This thread is about wether obesity in children is abuse. Some of us believe in some cases it's is. Children have been removed from their families over it. So therefore it can be classified as abuse. A third of children haven't been removed. Just some.

Comparing it to an adult smoking doesn't make sense. Because we are talking about children and the impact weight can have on them their entire life. Maybe the odd parent out there does force their child to smoke at five year old, but a third of children are not smokers.

Of course there are more unhealthy things than weight. Everything has a scale. Heroine, more dangerous than smoking. It doesn't follow that we should ignore obesity and hope it goes away with some higher taxes.

GreysAnalogy
boulevard that wasn't why I posted that photo. It was to show attitudes when presented with a slim body.

Nothing wrong with the woman in that image, but please don't assume a few comments from somewhere on the internet with names redacted and no source provided are in any way representative of the views of the general public.

The second point to make is that the strapline on the image: cupcakes make women huge, is a provactive, inaccurate and unhelpful message to send.

I don't want to shut down discussion, I just want a more nuanced and intelligent and constructive discussion.

"All the society changes will not make a difference of individuals don't take responsibility too."

Societal changes would, if they are the right changes, provide a context in which individuals can make the choices that are right for them.

Not right for Tesco shareholders. Not right for Kelloggs shareholders. Not right for Nabisco. Not right for WeightWatchers shareholders. Not right for Fitness First shareholders. Not right for Unilever, or whoever make Nutrisweet and Sweet and Low. Not right for KFC, Burger King, or MacDonalds. Not right for .... you get the picture.

right for them.

The reason why I posted the 3 graces is because I bet the 20 year olds who look like that think they have fat bums, and their boobs are too small. I bet they don't actually feel much better about themselves than their friends who are size 20. Although I think they look gorgeous (now), I looked like that when I was 20 and was pretty much in despair because I didn't have a hard bottom and thighs that didn't wobble.

Actually if they were real people they would probably be pretty healthy. they look supple and fit and robust and their flat tummies don't look like they have fatty livers behind them.

these hard-bodied role models - the Jane Fondas of the 80s, the Friends-era Courtney Coxes of the 90s, all the others ever since - actually conflate the natural softness of (many) women and girls with being overweight. And it causes despair. And it alienates girls and women from their bodies. and indirectly, through a fuck-it attitude and the ease and cheapness of eating your sorrows, it causes fatness

We need more real life health and feel good stuff: less hand wringing and angst when women are already in general so close to self loathing in such a profound and general way

We're very good at over-estimating individuals' (our own and each other's) levels of control over our lives and underestimating the effect of our circumstances/environment. If it was mostly about individual control/responsibility, why would SO many more poor people (in this country) be overweight, and smoke, and eat chicken McNuggets, than rich people (I over-generalise, of course)? Some inborn lack of control/sense of responsibility in the poor? I doubt it.
I agree, howbad, about the overwhelming vested interests in getting us to consume (benefiting society's richest). The enormous power of big brands and advertising interacting with our basic instincts (which of course vary from individual to individual) to consume calories when we can and do instantly gratifying things which involve sitting still. And the people with the most resources to resist these things are, on average, the richer and more educationally privileged (again, with exceptions).

If there is a duty to turn our back on forces causing obesity, it's not specifically down to fat people (and their parents) to do this, it's up to ALL of us to starve out and vote out consumer culture.

Not right for Tesco shareholders. Not right for Kelloggs shareholders. Not right for Nabisco. Not right for WeightWatchers shareholders. Not right for Fitness First shareholders. Not right for Unilever, or whoever make Nutrisweet and Sweet and Low. Not right for KFC, Burger King, or MacDonalds. Not right for .... you get the picture.

The power and influence these companies have is truly frightening. It will take a monumental shift to diminish this.

Katenka
This thread is about wether obesity in children is abuse. Some of us believe in some cases it's is. Children have been removed from their families over it. So therefore it can be classified as abuse. A third of children haven't been removed. Just some.

Removing children from families is incredibly rare (74 children over 5 years according to an earlier link) and relates to extreme cases of morbid obesity where there is imminent danger. 15 children per year in the context of 69,000 children in care and 1.5 million obese children in England is not an indication that childhood obesity is currently regarded by the authorities in terms of abuse.

The power and influence these companies have is truly frightening. It will take a monumental shift to diminish this.

I agree, shebird. I'm not sure how possible it is to be honest, as the hold seems to be ever increasing.

I know ("the hold seems to be ever increasing"). The challenge of not-consuming is tougher than it has ever been. The way that these corporations infiltrate schools etc is horrific.

15 children per year in the context of 69,000 children in care and 1.5 million obese children in England is not an indication that childhood obesity is currently regarded by the authorities in terms of abuse.

it shows it can be regarded as abuse by the authorities. Which is what everyone has been saying.

We need to address people's actual needs in ways that provide alternatives.

Example. I used to drink far too much. whenever I tried to cut down I found it hard to think of places to meet people. we all worked in London, lived at opposite ends of it, and wanted to meet in the centre of town, in the evening, and have a conversation. To be clear about the needs here: my need was for deep verbally expressed human friendship. We could have gone to the movies - fine when you want to see a film. We could have gone to a gym - fine if you want to run / swim / play squash. I wanted to sit down with my friends and say "here's the thing, what do you think?" for about 3 hours. We drank a lot because bars and pubs were the only places we could find to go - it was always dark and raining.

You see a lot of kids hanging about fried chicken shops. What is the human need? They don't necessarily feel able to invite each other back to their parents' houses; they aren't necessarily actually hungry. They need to spend money, to feel agency; they need a focal point for loose groups of acquaintances; the energy rush of salt, fat and protein probably doesn't go amiss; they are somehow validated by being there and buying and eating that stuff in no doubt a million ways I don't understand. It is easy to say "why do that when they could eat grilled chicken breast and salad at home with their loving mothers? Or do their mothers not love them enough to make it?" ra ra ra ra ra..... it's all missing the point.

What do those kids need that they get from that chicken shop, and how do we help them get what they need in other ways?

If our entire future is built on economic growth, we have to keep consuming more and more to keep the economy growing.

People overeating systematically is possibly part and parcel of the general over- consumption of everything (food, tech, stuff).

Advocating restraint is encouraging economic growth to slow

And wanting economic growth to slow down is very subversive!

"Advocating restraint is encouraging economic growth to slow"

Yes, which is why the substitution messages, and the "healthy" crap-bars, etc, are so ubiquitous. But it doesn't help. there is no food so "healthy" that you can eat it all the time. the spaces where we aren't consuming are what makes us human. (not just food.... consumption in general). the spaces are where we have time to produce. Time to think, write, talk, be, work, live, make friends, sing a song. Time, at St Ninians, to walk or run a mile, with your friends, without wearing magic shoes that cost £150 a pop, around the bit of outside that your school has always had and has somehow managed not to sell off.

It's not making anyone any money and it won't be allowed for much longer.

howbad you're missing my point. You're coming across as having the opinion that stating someone is fat, and needs to lose weight, even when it's relevant, is counter productive. I'm saying that when it comes to telling a parent their kids are fat, it's largely irrelevant. Because whatever self hatred and binge eating being called fat yourself might inspire, it doesn't trigger hatred of your kids and binge feeding.

Lurked, can I ask again about your qualifications in this area? Because you seem to be saying a few things that sound quite, um, not right, to me, like

• there is no emotional freight in suggesting to a parent that they haven't been feeding their child properly. there can therefore be no negative fallout from this.
• the child will be entirely insulated from whatever emotions are generated by this process. Which will be none.

Are you quite sure about these things?