fathausen by proxy?

[Jugjug]

I’ll preface by saying I don’t judge people with overweight children in the street because I don’t know their story or if the child has health conditions or has to take medication which causes weight gain.
I also don’t judge people who give their kids the occasional treat obviously.
I also don’t judge people with overweight older children/teenagers because I remember being that age and inhaling sweets my friends brought to school.

Now thats been said I know a few parents with visibly morbidly obese toddlers and the parents make no effort to sort it out and hand them family size bags of sweets as a snack!
Surely there must be something psychologically deeper going on here munchausens maybe? I just don’t get it

You joking? The people I know with obese toddlers are all either slim or slightly overweight

As I stated previously, I was morbidly obese as a toddler. (I had jowls. I've seen the pictures.) Mum was slim. There was no excess weight on Dad: he worked as a coalminer.

My maternal grandmother was heavy and pictures of her mother show a slim young mother but a heavy middle-aged mother. All the other family members were slim.

No one on my dad's side of the family was overweight. As I mentioned above, part of the problem was that Dad starved during the war.

It happens. I literally lived with a mother who did this, shared the kitchen, the inside of her cupboard was a mountain of crisps and sweets and cakes etc.

like I said I’m not judging random strangers in the street this is people I know

I'm fat. My children (young adults now) are a healthy weight, one of them at the lower end of a healthy BMI. As a fat person myself, I didn't want my children to go through the same difficulties that I've faced on account of my weight. I've always been careful to give them a balanced diet and educate them about healthy / less healthy choices. Now they're older, they generally make healthy choices and one of them is a lover of exercise and fitness (he's a personal trainer and works in elite sport). I'm happy they're a healthy weight and can't understand why some parents would undermine their children's wellbeing in this way. Having said that, we live in such an obesogenic environment that maintaining a healthy weight is more difficult than ever.

Duplicate post - sorry

Duplicate post - sorry

My (younger) SIL is just lovely - sweet, caring, thoughtful but with very low self esteem partly related to her weight. When she was much younger I used to watch MIL absolutely overload SiL's plate, encourage her on to make herself snacks, and so on. Given that MIL ate like a bird I did wonder about the dynamic there.

Still waiting for pp to tell us how the cost of living causes people to put ON weight 🤔

Because it's not just about the cost, it's about parents who are living in poverty despite working wild hours to survive, who then throw upf meals on for speed or because they're so tired, or who give on to their children's demands for junk food because they are stressed and shattered and their mental health is hanging on by a thread. Or as a pup said, parents who can't afford holidays or days out and so getting chocolate and crisps is a comfort that they can afford. Answers like this just highlight the disparity between those who are comfortably off and the reality of those who aren't because so many other things come into play that you wouldnt even consider if you haven't seen or experienced them, what I have given as examples is just the tip of the iceberg.

on an anonymous site you have no way of knowing that that poster is comfortably well off just because they disagree

I sympathise with your arguments about parents too tired from working all day so they microwave a meal or buying the occasional chocolate as a treat because they can’t afford holidays. Im not a healthy eating zealot. But we’re talking extreme cases here a toddler doesn’t actually become obese just because it ate an occasional ready meal or chocolate bar. It’s actually quite hard for a healthy toddler to become obese.

like I said I lived with a mother of an obese toddler, shared a kitchen saw the inside of her cupboards the amount of junk food he was consuming was insane we’re talking a steady stream of chocolate biscuits here. There’s just no excuse it was insane

I was responding directly to the comment about how does the COL crisis cause people to put on weight. I definitely believe and agree that there are children who are overfed to the point of obesity by their parents and it doesn't have anything to do with poverty, but there is a correlation between poverty and childhood obesity and there are a whole host of reasons (many which I've missed) for that.

Because it's not just about the cost, it's about parents who are living in poverty despite working wild hours to survive, who then throw upf meals on for speed or because they're so tired, or who give on to their children's demands for junk food because they are stressed and shattered and their mental health is hanging on by a thread.

This doesn’t make children obese. As I said before, a dinner of pizza, nuggets, chips etc doesn’t make a child fat. They have to be getting an excess of calories to put on weight.

This topic comes up with fair regularity on here, and I'm constantly baffled by the sheer amount of people that are willing to make excuses.

Of course there will be outliers - but toddlers and very young children should not be fat. It should be actively difficult for them to be fat.

But instead, we ascribe wildly unlikely scenarios to these people rather than saying that yes, we agree, something has gone wrong here for the parents to not understand how to feed their child properly. I'm not saying that this is always - and probably is fairly rarely tbh - with malicious intent. But shouting how it's some sort of fatphobia to say that when a child is very fat, that is a problem, is just flat out ridiculous. How can anyone help where there is an issue if we can't even address it?

I watched a YouTube video fairly recently where a bloke only ate the £1 ready meals from Iceland for a week for all three meals a day. He was eating at around a 25% calorie deficit every single day. Was not what I was expecting at all (and possibly not hugely relevant to this conversation as he's obviously a grown adult and not a small child) - I guess I'm just agreeing that it's an excess of calories and not just eating the "wrong" things. After all, kids with ARFID and similar issues are talked about a lot here - a kid with a diet solely of chicken nuggets is surely more likely to underweight than overweight unless they're eating too many of them!

Do you think the human genome has substantially changed over the past 50 years, Because in the 1970s, there were not nearly the obesity rates of today.

I think you would find it really interesting to read "why we eat (too much)" . It will answer that question in depth. Yes the food environment has changed but essentially some people are genetically much more vulnerable to those changes than others.

There are a lot of issues imo and they combine into a kind of perfect storm.

Lack of exercise. Kids driven everywhere. Kids on devices for hours. No playing out.

Inadequate sleep leads to weight gain. I see a lot of people now let their kids stay up as late as they want.

Snacking is huge I think. Mid 20th century, most people were told that they were not supposed to snack between meals - only very young children did this. Now kids snack all day if they want. Snacks are also a major feature of a lot of kids activities. Most snacks seem to be unhealthy.

Portion sizes, people have lost all sense of what this should be. We have an old retro burger place where I live, the burgers are the same as they were in the 50s. They are happy meal sized burgers, for an adult. Regular size fries and drink, also Happy Meal size.

Treats aren't once a month, much less every few months. They are every day in many cases.

I’m a child of the 70s. DH grew up on frozen and fried foods, DH had chips almost every night. neither of us was overweight.
I think it’s portion side and what they are allowed to snack on. I see people feeding their children adult sized portions.

Just watched this documentary on childhood obesity. Extremely interesting.

Gives great insight into the parent's minds.

I'm not sure about the "on purpose" , but as an emergency foster carer, we had a darling little 18 month old arrive late one Friday night, and although there were clothes in her suitcase ( a charity runs it) it said 2yo girl on the sticker. She was easily a size 5. We had to get her all new clothes. Turns out Grandma had been left in charge of her and her 4yo high needs brother and had just fed her sweet biscuits and 2 litres of milk every day so she could keep an eye on the brother. Very sad. I guess that is neglect by the parents. But not the grandma. She was doing her best.

I think there are a number of reasons.

Crisps, as someone up thread said were a weekly treat. When I was little the ice cream van would come around once a week and in winter would sell things like crisps. My brother and I were given money, we would go out and pick a treat, and that was it until the following week.

Now crisps are seen as a daily thing. Supermarket meal deals are usually a sandwich, crisps and a drink. That's echoed in a lot of packed lunches. I had a friend call me in tears because she had argued with her son (who was about 14) and somehow the last packet of crisps in the house had ended up spread across the kitchen floor. I had to reassure her that having a single day without crisps was child neglect.

I watched a documentary (I remember the one referred to earlier, it was tragic). It might have been 'fast food babies' one toddler and his parents would sit at the table to eat, the toddler would refuse so mum would go to the chip shop and get him chips that he could sit on the sofa watching TV to eat.

I wonder if its their (unhealthy) way of making their children happy? People living in poverty can't give their children a lot but they can give them cheap junk food - do they think they're being kind in a twisted sort of way? I mean people call hamburgers and chips and rubbish food a treat - in what way is that a treat? A beautiful meal, cooked properly in an ambient location is a treat - not a bag of chips or a chocolate bar lol. I think its sometimes just easier than saying no. They don't have the parenting skills required to raise children.

My youngest sister has always been obese and is DM favourite, was never ever told no. I don't think my DM wants her to be fat, she wants her to feel she is loved and special and therefore gets what she wants. DM treats the grandchildren the same. Spoils them to show love.

I genuinely believe that the moment the Conservative government removed Food Tech from the core curriculum, the cooking skills & understanding of nutrition of the nation deteriorated. But it was all about saving a few quid from the Education budget rather than looking at the longer term health of the nation.
Add into that the cost of living, many addictive & cheap UPFs, social media and generally choosing the easy option, and it’s a perfect storm.
Makes me very angry that pupils (who are of course now adults) were let down in the 90s & it’s passed down to their families.

I don't think it's related to Munchausen's - if it were they would be taking the kids to the doctor all the time, whereas actually most parents with very obese kids are pretty resistant to engaging with healthcare services (or even admitting there's a problem). Some people just have bad parenting skills, think that never saying no to them equals love and so on.