As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
The thin line between poor diet and child abuse
Leitner
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The Times wrote:Though Connor McCreaddie is only an eight-year-old boy, his sheer size has turned him into a demolition man. At 14 stone, and with a boy’s abandon, he has broken four beds, six lavatory seats and five bicycles. And he’s still got a lot of growing to do.
His obesity and lack of fitness mean he has difficulty walking. Sometimes he cannot even manage the seven-minute stroll to school, leading to a poor attendance record and missed education.
...
The health risks faced by obese children are undeniable. According to the report on childhood obesity by the health select committee, obesity will soon surpass smoking as the greatest cause of premature loss of life. Obese children run a high risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, kidney failure and arthritis. The committee of MPs estimated that the cost of treating overweight and obese patients is at least £7 billion a year.
...
Dr Alyson Hall, consultant child psychiatrist at the Emanuel Miller Centre for Families and Children in east London, says that, in extreme cases, obese children need to be taken into foster care to ensure their safety.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article1434671.ece
I find myself siding with those that believe this child should be taken into care. This is not just a little puppy fat and not caused by feeding him a few extra packets of crisps as some critics may have you believe. For a child with no genetic conditions or diseases the only way they can reach a weight such as this is through constant and long term overfeeding.
I believe this does constitute abuse. Through this neglectful feeding she is ruining his future prospects at anything nearing a normal eating pattern later in life and doing horrendous things to his long term health – He will be lucky to make it to his thirties at this rate let alone live anything like a normal lifespan.
However the slippery slope argument is always present especially in cases such as this. At what point should care workers stop trying to change the parents and the child through meetings and the like and intervene. Where do we draw the line between simply poor parenting and neglectful parenting in cases such as? What weight band is acceptable and which falls under dangerously overweight?
Leitner on
0
Posts
A child of 8 who overeats will not starve himself in an effort to get crisps and providing you offer food to him at every meal and make every effort to get him to eat it you are doing nothing wrong by not giving in and feeding him burgers for a few days.
To do any less with an 8 year old is clearly evidence of poor parenting, perhaps I disagree with taking the kid into permanent care, instead perhaps the mother/father should be forced to attend some kind of counselling meetings to restore her faith in the fact that she is in charge. Not the kid.
I think that these types of people prey on those who have addictions or weaknesses, similar to someone who constantly takes advantage of someone with low self esteem, or similar to giving a heroin addict more and more heroin.
Yes they might not say 'No', hell, they might even encourage it, but that doesn't make it morally correct if you're entirely aware that you're causing them more and more damage.
in all seriousness his mother and granny should be shot, they've repeated plenty of times that he eats whatever sweets and what not they buy. i dont hink its evere occurred to them to sstop buying such shitty food considering they can see how much damage its doing to their own child. i mean they still buy him chips and sausage twice a week with countless otyher takeaways, you'd thing they would have stopped when the kid started to get big, not wait until hes morbidly obese before deciding to try and do something about it.
though its not too much of a suprise as wallsend (suburb of newcastle upon tyne in uk) is essential an urban wasteland full of high rise tennementsand full of underage mothers and drug addicts, so its not that much of a suprise that they cant look after a child as they can barely look after themselves. thing is though given what its like living up here putting him into care wouldnt solve much as most of the foster parents hes likely to be placed are just as bad.
Pics or it didn't happen ....
There *are* some people genetically predisposed to gaining more weight per food intake then others.. but thats not to say that changing what you intake & moving around more won't fix that right up.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
theres some good quotes in here, especcially the one wheres shes blaming doctorxs for not helping. or this one "Through Connor's weight gain there's been no-one there to step in" yes there has YOU! take some responsability woman its your child you can choose what to feed them and tell them what to eat.
How they managed to be allowed to keep him is a mystery. He should be fostered with some thin vegans.
The real trouble here is once you carry that kind fo weight as a kid it is pretty much there for good. Your bones and such develop around carrying 40 extra pounds your chances of losing that weight later in life is near zero.
Makes me kinda glad he's so fat.
Beware of people who eat themselves into giants.
Or alternatively just make sure you're able to run ten feet.
H8 fat people.
Things like this make me want to pass a fat tax through congress.
Grossly Overweight? Pay $$$. The money goes toward supporting other fat peoples.
This problem didn't just start. It started 8 years ago. You can't let the child make the rules. Where this starts is the kid refusing to eat their meal and the parent giving them something less healthy just so they eat SOMETHING. I've been through that a couple of times with the munchkin, and it breaks my heart to see her go hungry, but I cant let myself give in either. One missed meal isn't going to hurt her, and we almost never have a problem getting her to eat the next one (especially since if she doesn't eat enough at a meal, she doesn't get snacks until after the next meal).
I find myself seriously considering mandatory parenting classes for all pregnant women and their partners. If someone's a good parent to start with, they'll breeze through the class and hopefully provide a good example for the others. If they aren't, we can help them before they make this kind of mistake, or worse. I suspect that as we go more and more generations from the time when the extended family was always nearby to act as an example and to help out, we're going to see more and more first-time parents who haven't got a clue what they're doing and need a bit of help.
Me too. Hi5.
I don't think the mother is actually intimidated by this kid, I think she's just a shit parent. That Metro article has her banging on about how "the doctors should have said something," and "she's had no help."
I'm not entirely sure what a doctor would be able to do other than say "Stop feeding him so much fucking crap" (which, it seems, is exactly what their doctor told them). She seems to be insisting that the State should be raising her kid for her, then getting all pissy when the Social workers try to step in. You don't get to abdicate responsibility for your child then complain when the Government tries to take them away.
This bit (from The Times article in the OP) is classic as well:
"He likes chips and mashed potatoes and all the wrong foods. I am trying to introduce healthier foods to his diet but he refuses to eat 90% of them."
Guess what? Kids don't always do what they're fucking told. It's your job as his parent to make him act in his own best interest, because he's to young to fully understand the long-term consequences of his actions. It's not like we're talking about letting it slide when an otherwise healthy kid won't eat their vegetables, we're talking about a child with a serious health problem who won't take the necessary remedial action on his own. How would you react if the parent of a child with Type 1 diabetes wasn't administering insulin because "He doesn't like it."?
I really fear for this child because he's apparently been pandered to for so long that if he is taken into care (which doesn't look like it's happening now, for better or worse) he's just going to resent the foster parents because they're being mean to him by making him eat a reasonable diet.
Wow, that turned into more of a rant than I intended, but I stand by it.
"GALACTUS MUST FEED! HERALD- LOCATE FOR ME A PLANET MADE OF HO-HO'S!"
Last time I checkd Galatus could probably stand up under his own power.
Does publishing an international article about how fat a kid is constitute abuse?
Seriously. Everyone this kid knows has seen this by now. It's not like they didn't already know he was fat, but now he's so fat that he's news.
I want to say "no", on the grounds that this isn't some unfortunate bad-luck infliction like a lot of overweight people where there's a glandular disorder or they just have a super-slow metabolism, this happened through his own deliberate actions and choices. But at the same time he's only 8 and probably isn't terribly conscious of what he's doing to himself.
Of course, weighing more than a stocky 5'8" adult at age 8 means he isn't likely to live all that long anyway. I mean I can smoke a pack a day and still be at lower risk of heart-disease than this kid who's about a third of my age.
Granted, but honestly no matter what you do, SOMEONE is going to take advantage of it. If you let that stop you, it'll paralyze any support structure you can build.
Things like basic nutrition and the concept of placing limits on kids just aren't getting through to an alarmingly large number of people, and in many places we no longer have the social structure in which a kind neighbor is going to step in and help a struggling young mother. Combine that with a growing sense of entitlement and you make it less likely that people will even accept good advice when it's offered.
It is obvious that this mother is clueless, she's not alone, it's just not this glaringly obvious in most cases, and most people aren't willing to admit that they don't know something.
I also enjoyed the Sunday Times article 'Fatboy could go in care' . It went something like this: Connor has already broken 4 beds and 5 bicycles. Classic.
I recommend a healthy level of bullying to lose the weight. Or perhaps have a particular angry dog chase him constantly. If all fails, tell his mother to get a grip and stop feeding him.
Perhaps I should write a diet book. The central tenet will be 'Eat less, exercise more'.
It's really a lack of education on the nature of what they eat.
It's like the debate for giving young girls treatment against HPV.
Are you so lazy and uneducated as a parent that you don't want to change your ideas and lifestyle to make life for your child better? Or do you want to actually help them and give them all advantages?
Some people don't deserve the right to have children.
I doubt that kid will ever truely be in shape. It takes serious work and sacrifice to lose even 20-30 pounds, let alone hundreds.
I doubt his behavior will ever change enough to the point where he isn't overweight.
I contend that the Sunday Times put a space between 'fat' and 'boy'.
Puzzle League: 073119-160185