Why isn't child obesity classed as neglect?

[dinklu]

(Setting aside medical conditions that may contribute to weight gain.)

If a child is severely underweight due to a lack of proper nutrition, it is often seen as neglect. But when a child is significantly overweight due to consistently poor diet and lack of exercise, it is not typically viewed in the same way. Why is that?

Is it because there aren't enough resources or support for parents? Or is it simply not recognised as a form of neglect in the same way malnutrition is? Curious to hear other perspectives.

Cause of death.

inflammation and infection in extensive areas of ulceration arising from obesity and its complications, and immobility in a girl with spina bifida and hydrocephaluss*

A healthy weight child but immobile,with a significant injury /wound, would've died too from similar neglect.

An obese child that was properly cared wouldn't have.

It should be.

That’s not what I stated but all of it was neglect sadly. There are many neglected children in this country. More overweight than under I have found in my area of work. Arguably parents may struggle and a lack of support may contribute.

I was a chubby kid and a fat teenager. It wasn't my parents fault, I had disordered eating and would steal or buy food. I also was diagnosed with a hormone disorder in my 20s, which is linked to obesity and insulin resistance.

It was more of a “dumping ground” than a teenager’s bedroom, said one witness. “It had the look of a storage facility”, said PC Liam Donovan. He noticed the hoist above her bed was covered with cobwebs and fly faeces.
Two strips of fly paper hung from the ceiling, with 110 insects trapped. Milk bottles and fruit juice cartons filled with urine surrounded Kaylea’s bed. There was faeces on the floor of her en suite bathroom. The smell was worse than anything Donovan had ever encountered, making him retch.
Kaylea herself, lying on “puppy pads” sodden with urine, was clearly very overweight: morbidly obese, it turned out, weighing 146kg (22st 13lb), despite being just 1.45 metres (4ft 8in) tall. Her legs were unusually short, a symptom of the spina bifida she developed in the womb, along with hydrocephalus (water on the brain). When police rolled her over, maggots wriggled where she had been lying.

He did not pull back her duvet to reveal her sore-covered legs, or her feet, which a podiatrist examining photos of her dead body said were the worst he had seen in 30 years of practice. Or her toenails, which she could not reach because of her morbid obesity and mobility issues, and had not been cut for six to 10 months.
It was “laziness” again that caused him to text Kaylea to be quiet when he heard her screaming the night before her body was found, rather than go downstairs to see if she was OK. “If you have a bad chest, stop screaming,” he wrote to her shortly after 10.30pm on 9 October 2020, explaining to the jury that she had a cold.
At 8am the next morning, her mother discovered Kaylea dead in bed. By the time a paramedic arrived 10 minutes later, rigor mortis had already set in.

What is the disorder?

Severe PCOS (Stein Levanthal Syndrome it used to be called) and also a form of Binge Eating Disorder. I grew up with a lot of severe childhood trauma and food and self harm were my coping mechanisms.

It is in severe cases

Where I live you can get a large dominoes pizza on special for $12. That would also buy you 1 1/2 cauliflowers. Other fruit and veg is just as expensive. I can see why families chose the pizza.

My overweight, probably obese, boy is just the same. Doesn't understand his emotions or hunger, will eat till he's uncomfortably full, that's when he feels full. He mistakes negative emotions for hunger and literally eats his emotions. Siblings are one slim and one average.

Well that went well... just asked dd if she'd like to hop on my scales and that we just keep an eye on things, to make sure we're being healthy etc. it's a digital Bluetooth one so was going to cover up the display and just record it on my phone:
But she got upset and said I was being offensive and shouted at me to leave her room 😞

American? Most people on this site are British, here dominos pizzas are ridiculously overpriced and a cauliflower is about £1

I agree, the kids aren't in poverty if the parents can give them expensive treats like pringles and energy drinks.

I don't particularly like cauliflower but i'd prefer to eat it than a domino-no-no-no pizza.
Pizza + delivery £10.79
1 supermarket cauliflower £1.19. (I'd walk there to buy it)

I agree that there is now a real issue with childhood obesity...but how can we tackle this without a huge amount of resources specifically aimed at this?

In my current Year 3 class of 32 children, 6 are seriously overweight (none with underlying medical issues that might cause this). All of them have parents who are also clinically obese. Two of these 6 are so overweight that they cannot get up from the floor without rolling over and using their hands/arms to help them up. Both cannot wear the schools uniform as they don't make them big enough...they wear jogging bottoms and oversize t-shirts. These children are 7 years old...I can't begin to imagine what their lives will be like going forward...without real changes to their diet and exercise, they will continue to get bigger and bigger.

There's only so much schools can do to educate on 'healthy lifestyles', as the children themselves can't change what they eat and how they spend their free time. Makes me very sad.

It is.

Children’s health services do offer healthy family programmes but families choose if they want to be involved or not. Obviously these vary depending on area.

Of course she can. But the OP clearly has an agenda and hasn't actually listened to any of the people on this thread with a more nuanced approach.

And even if her step child's mother is the worst person in the world, that doesn't necessarily mean that every parent with an overweight child is a terrible person.

I have a friend who is in despair over her DS' weight. She is doing as much as she can to solve the problem. I believe that her and her Dh did play a rolein how he got to the point he's at but I also see the work she is doing to try to fix the problem.

And while I agree that ften cooking healthier food is not that expensive, I think it's naive not to realise that doing so in a way that is tasty and convenient can be very difficult.

The OP did state that they weren't including medical issues. I think the lack of fitness is even worse than the obesity, though clearly linked.

My DDs class did the national fitness testing, some 9/10yos scored under 5-7 on the bleep test. This is the fitness equivalent of not being able to read the letter A, it's appallingly unfit. I've been seriously ill in the past and when recovering with physio and rehab, this was not a level I'd have been considered better, but it's ok for kids to live their whole lives like this.

A child with such low literacy would have conversations with the parents, put help in place etc. A child that gets breathless going up a single flight of stairs is left to get on with getting fatter and more unfit. The parents were not even told, let alone encouraged to make lifestyle changes.

That poster mentioned a large dominos pizza which is £12 probably more if you want delivery. Honestly the arguement would of made a lot more sense if they'd said a Tesco value pizza.

But on what planet is one and a half Cauliflowers the same price as a large dominos pizza? Idk must be an American thing

We didn't snack constantly though or need to have a bottle of drink with us all the time. Eating between meals was considered 'spoiling your appetite'. Now there are people who are constantly grazing.

This isn't true when you consider satiety. Bread, for example, is one of the cheapest foods for how much it fills you up and how versatile it is, and cheap bread is very unhealthy. There's a post now about how to slash the cost of a food shop and lots of the suggestions are around bread.

But jelly didn't write skinny, she wrote slim.

You can get cheap pizzas in the supermarket too. And the cauliflower isn't a meal in itself.

Neither is a pizza @Gwenhwyfar .

For £10 I could buy enough for several healthy meals, not a carb and fat heavy quick-fix that would not nourish me.

I've nothing against cheap supermarket pizzas. On the rare occasion I get one, adding a bit more veg, cheese and garlic makes them quite tasty.

I just don't buy the cooking from scratch is so expensive when the fatties are filling their trollies with UPF and their bill at the checkout is enormous, when my bill isn't.

"Neither is a pizza ** . "

How do you mean? It may not be the healthiest meal, but it's obviously a meal by itself.

"fatties are filling their trollies with UPF and their bill at the checkout is enormous, when my bill isn't."

How do you know what everybody else's bills are? I can at least tell you that someone eating the cheapest white bread and the cheapest jam and buying whatever is on yellow label and getting whatever is on 'to good to go' whether healthy or not is probably spending less than someone buying mainly fruit and veg.

Go on any 'eat for less than x' FB group and you will see the many, many suggestions to eat bread, etc. and only a few recipes for stews and casseroles.