We all know that childhood obesity is a serious problem here in the United States. Sure, obese kids are unhealthy but is it child abuse?
Harvard University child obesity expert Dr. David Ludwig thinks so. He goes as far as to suggest that parents should lose custody of their fat children:
"In severe instances of childhood obesity, removal from the home may be justifiable, from a legal standpoint, because of imminent health risks and the parents' chronic failure to address medical problems," Ludwig co-wrote with Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and researcher at Harvard's School of Public Health.
Do you agree? Should the state intervene and take morbidly obese children away from the parents and put them into foster care, even as a last resort?
But he has a point when he says: "It's also no guarantee of success, but when we have a 400-pound child with life threatening complications, there may not be any great choices."
(And where do they draw the line? When the child is in immediate danger of dying: OK, but I would find it hard to believe there are a lot of such cases.)
Should children be taken from their parents, if they don't feed them, risking serious diseases from malnutrition or even death?
There have been many cases of child neglect with children almost starving, so is it wrong to take these children from parents, who acted harmfully to the childs health?
But your example is more easy to determine. When is a child too obese, this is a very blurry line. Also: too much food might be a symptom of too much love. In your example that case could not be made.
[deleted by admin - no name calling please]
Once children reach a certain age, parents cannot take all of the blame. Kids are bombarded with so much advertising for junk food. If they want to eat it, they'll find a way even if their parents try to educate them and provide a healthy diet. They'll use their pocket money to buy junk food dirt cheap and lie about it, or they'll get it from their friends.
I have no idea where you are getting that from. Some people say certain parents are bad, I say all parents are bad. I'm just lowering the bar, not calling anyone names like those who say only certain parents are bad.
Everywhere you look, stores are pushing "fits in your SUV cupholder" snack cups filled with tiny bitesized crap, aimed at parents who think "if they're shoving food in their mouths, at least they're not screaming." Snack foods aren't an occasional rare treat for good behavior anymore. They're a routine occurrence that takes place several times a day. No wonder kids are growing up fat.
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As it turned out, it was two unnecessary months of hell. Anamarie didn't improve at all in foster care, and she was returned to her parents. The young girl was later diagnosed with a genetic predisposition.
This refers to the very young child who was taken away from her parents several years ago and put into state custody because she was obese. As it turned out, it didn't do any good, and did do a lot of harm. Is this representative of what would happen if this were a common practice, or is it just a nonrepresentative occurrence? We don't know, because we don't have any research on the subject. When the research has not been done, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the null hypothesis has not been disproven (more about this later.)
And that's why this entire thing is-- or should be-- a no-brainer. Social services are *supposed* to be run on the basis of evidence-based practices. This means that if you'd like to use a therapeutic modality or intervention, you actually have to have some kind of proof that it works. (Yes, I'm an MSW-- called a QMHP in Oregon and some other states.)If anyone can actually prove that taking obese children away from their parents does any good at all in terms of the outcomes, then it *might* be justified-- although even then, that's a big if. However, the research has not been done, and there is no evidence base. Anecdotes and vague stories are not enough, although the only case studies we do have go in the other direction, such as the one above. It really says something that nobody ever seems to be able to even come up with an actual, verifiable case study showing that taking an obese child out of the family and into state custody simply on the basis of obesity-- not because of any other confounding factors, such as physical/sexual abuse-- has positive effects outweighing the negative ones. One case study in that direction wouldn't prove much of anything, but when we haven't even seen that,it's really disturbing to see anybody jump on this bandwagon so enthusiastically.
So that's why the only responsible, reasonable thing to do is to go with that null hypothesis, which has not been disproven-- and in this case, that would translate to keeping the family together if there are no signs of anything that has actually been proven to be abuse.It would be grossly unethical to do anything else, and as a social worker, I would do everything in my power to stop it if I found out that it was going on.