to ask why would you overfeed your child?

[ineedtoknowwhy]

I'm sure this question has been asked before but, please, can someone explain to me why would a parent overfeed an already obese child?

Every day when I drop my daughter off at nursery I see the same little girl being dropped off too. She is always on her buggy which suggest they live nearby so could potentially walk but never ever do. At pick ups is the same, straight from nursery into buggy. Her face is always covered in chocolate (at 8 in the morning!) and she is always holding some sort of biscuit or chocolate belly so big her shirts don't come below her belly button. I am not talking about a bit chubby, or with a bit of a belly.

I cannot help to think poor child whose mum is happy to keep feeding her biscuits, chocolates, etc. when the child is clearly not in a healthy weight.

I can't help but silently judge her in my head so please can someone explain reasons for this. If you are a mum with an overweight child, why would you do this?

Does it being chocolate cereal make it any more unhealthy than other cereals? What's unhealthy is the sugar. Many other cereals have high levels of sugar. The addition of cocoa (which is actually healthy) doesn't make it more unhealthy than non-chocolate cereals which are very sugary. My daughter loves granola but baby granola are shockingly high in sugar. She also likes chocolate weetabix which is lower in sugar.

No you’re right. I said chocolate cereal because that’s what the poster asked about and said her son had.
I’d say the same about any high sugar cereal.

@SallyWDexactly, crunchy nut cornflakes, weetabix with sugar, jam, marmalade, pancakes, nearly all have more sugar than we need in them. The plain chocolate ‘o’ type cereal are actually green on the traffic light system, compared to Dorset cereal honey granola

I can’t understand this either - it should be something that nurseries/GPs/HVs can report parents to social services for. Not to condemn or threaten, but because they have parent support services for those who are struggling. This is neglect - it’s failure to research and provide nutritious healthy food and consequently putting this child’s health at risk. Frankly I think it is more likely to be down to parents being uneducated, maybe even intellectually challenged, and possibly lazy. Parents like the ones you describe need an intervention and support so that the child is protected.

@CautiousLurker01do you have any idea what SS are dealing with? Teachers are often have to ring home to inform parents that something such as a full size tube of Pringles with no other food provided is not a suitable lunch. So this kid is a bit fat and comes in with a biscuit in her hand? It’s not great but it’s definitely not something for SS.
To give you an idea, a primary age child smelling strongly of weed each day no longer meets threshold in our area. There’s just not resources and it’s frankly not that much of an issue to the government. I’ve met some lovely fat children and some odious/ borderline sociopathic children who eat nothing but houmous, kale and rice noodles.

I have an American friend. She, her DH and her 4 adult children are all very obese. She's a brilliant mum. Her children are her life and she loves them fiercely. She just has no idea about healthy food! Her Facebook feed is full of photos of them eating huge portions of burgers, fries, pancakes, waffles, giant cookies, milkshakes etc. I don't think it would ever occur to her to have something like grilled fish and salad for dinner! To her, food is love. She loves her family by indulging them with food.
I know she's American but I know British families who are the same. Their enture diets are junk food, takeaways, crisps, chocolate, cakes, biscuits. They refer to salads and vegetables as "rabbit food" and seems to think healthy foods are "disgusting".
It's a real problem with bo easy answer. Once you start eating healthily you feel better. You want to eat healthy foods abd unhealthy foods become less appealing. However, many people don't even try. They don't know where to start.

oh bugger off judgy pants

This.

Sugar is incredibly addictive as are many UPFs, as long as Big Food has vast marketing budgets and is allowed to essentially ring fence the UK food industry those who have an inability to avoid or control their intake of UPFs will always be on the back foot. They want you fat and sick so their friends in Big pharma can peddle their medications to you.

Yes. I do . I simply said that it ‘SHOULD’ be something that the social services teams can deal with. It is abuse and neglect. That child will end up with cavities as well as already being obese - childhood obesity is a predictor of adult obesity and all the heart and health issues that flow from it. It is as serious a parental failing as not feeding them at all.

No need to patronise and admonish me over a system that will fail this child. Target your acid elsewhere.

"They want you fat and sick so their friends in Big pharma can peddle their medications to you."
Actually I don't believe this bit. There is no conspiracy between sectors. They just want you to buy more of their products so they make more money. So they make it addictive (which is reprehensible enough without looking for further evil plans)

I remember a family my lot went to school with

The whole family where massive-mum,dad,grandparents,auntie and the kids

The mother and aunt where dinner ladies at the school and I had to complain more than once because they would stand over the kids,barking at them to finish their lunches and refusing to allow the kids to leave the table until every scrap was eaten-even when the kids said they where full

Their kids where so fat,they had rolls for arms,legs and necks and I heard both mum and aunt moaning they where struggling to find uniform to fit and laughing because the kids where all in the widest fitting shoes (because their feet and ankles where so big)

You never saw those kids without some sort of food in their hands

Fast forward a few years and adult dd and I had gone to cosmos (an all you can eat) for a treat (this was a massive one off,it had just opened at the time and id taken her to celebrate her first job)

We happened to sit next to the youngest dd of the family above

As dd and I where finishing off our first plate,the young lady next to us was finishing her 7th

She'd piled each plate really high and ate so fast,there's no way she could have even tasted the food

Sadly,she was even bigger than I remembered

Ones just had a baby and the cycle will continue-they've already nicknamed her 'butterball' (she's a year old and they are struggling to find clothes to fit her)

Its a form of abuse-I've had days when it would have been easier to shove a bag of buttons in their hands to shut them up and we used to have 'picnic dinners' every Monday (sandwich,babybel,crisps and yogurt) as a once a week treat (the kids loved it) but the rest of the time it was home cooked meals and they where active,fit and healthy

judgy pants?? Ooooo, offensive.

is this how you treat your children, to set them up for a life of bullying, rancid teeth, a shorter life span and chronic health problems?

Would social services step in in a case like this? The parents are building terrible ill-health into that poor child, which will have lifelong repercussions if not turned round now.

I wish they would

I'm nc with my whole family now but at the time I was so worried,I rang them

Not out of spite but out of sheer worry about his health

They spoke to the parents and his school and then left it in the hands of them

The school tried to help and put them in touch with a dietician at our local hospital

The parents didn't engage,my mother laughed,my father pointed out that its not healthy (he's fine with food,but was shouted down) and they carried on as they are

My brother has type 2 diabetes,is at risk of a stroke and has been told he will die if he doesn't change his ways

He just laughs and carries on,his wife (my sil) thinks its no problem and her ds is 'fine as he is' and my mother carries on overfeeding him

All are unbelievably big and in denial-my brother cannot walk more than a few yards without having to sit down and my nephew is going the same way-hes unbelievably unfit as well as fat (his parents drive him everywhere so he doesn't really get any exercise)

I remember some petition (I'm going back a few years ago) online to stop p.e and games lessons at schools

Both these idiots signed it (as 'we hated pe and games so why should we put our child through it?')

without it,my nephew would be even bigger

You see it on here all the time. Any time a poster starts a thread raising what sounds like a reasonable concern re their child’s weight you get 10 posters asking them never to mention it to the kid as it’s puppy fat and they’ll grow out of it. It’s pure fantasy, even if the kid has a growth spurt then having a sedentary lifestyle or too big portions will catch up with them. There are ways of talking about food and health without calling your kid a fatso but there seems to be a real aversion to even talk about food intake.

There's a mum at school like this. Her youngest daughter is huge, only 3 years old but in clothes for an 8 year old. Her legs are very big. She gets out of breath easily.My dd used to work with her mum who goes on and on about the doctors testing little one for diabetes.
The school is by a shop. I park outside the shop.Every single day, she comes out of the shop with handfuls of sweets. The other day it was a big bag of Squashums, a candy pizza and a bag of Haribo. Plus a small bottle of pop.
I may be being judgemental, but I grew up in a sweet shop- I'm nearly 57- and my whole life has been ruled by my weight.

I agree with Op, there was a really overweight girl in my son's year and I would see her being given a family bar of chocolate after school every night.

Always the usual drivel.. he is big boned like me, puppy fat, big for his age, he is a solid child, was born big, will grow into himself, I have no idea why he is so big, he eats the same as the rest of us, it's in his genes, he is predisposed to gain weight etc etc etc.

No Love, you feed him shit and too much of it and yes he is fat and also yes, it is child abuse.

How a mother can sit back and make every excuse in the world for why their child is fat and do nothing or worse still, deny that their child is fat and do nothing is beyond me. Have you not got eyes? Can you not see they are 3 times bigger than their peers? How can you sit and watch them waddle into school with their shit lunch and set them up for a life of obesity? It's bloody abuse, plain and simple.

Obviously this does not include children with medical issues like PWS.

It’s easy to see why OP. I got royally slated for pointing out that a size 14 in women isn’t really considered slim and if people think it’s slim then we have a really distorted view of what is healthy.

The body positivity movement is seriously damaging people’s perspectives on healthy weights.

There is still food tech though and lessons on nutrition (my dc are at secondary school).

I was horrified when they told me what their classmates ate for dinner - they had discussed it as part of the lesson. Total beige diet, processed crap, pizza, McDonalds etc. every single night. Parents should absolutely know better in this day and age. No one is saying you should never eat pizza or chips, but every night? No wonder so many children are overweight, their gut biomes are completely buggered!

@MrsB74as I said, I'm a food teacher. Yes there are lessons until the end of ks3 but after that it's not compulsory and even up to that point they may only do an hour a week for one term of the year.

Food education must be prioritised.

Dd3 was in the same class as the headmistress' son at primary school. His gm used to pick him up from school and greet him with a family sized bar of chocolate, a bag of doughnuts or a bag of cookies. He was very overweight!

This is a kind of cruelty to children - really! it is depriving them of health in their future, and not only physical health, as they will likely have food issues that cause mental distress as well, and it will affect their whole life. There must be some way to intervene in the case of a 3 year old like this!

Yes, I would. My niece is super skinny and her mum feeds her haribo bags every time I see her and drives me nuts. I don't say anything of course.

I had a friend at uni who has skinny but only ate fries and trash food. Her skin was awful and her hair too, you could tell her eating habits were poor just by looking at how she looked and she was skinny. The difference was that at that point she was 20 years old and could make her own decisions, not a 2 year old that gets handed crap food.

My only remark re pushchair is I walk my son to nursery in his pushchair 1.2 miles away, he could never walk that.

Other than that I think you’re absolutely correct and it’s appalling letting your child get that big.