Okay, I'll get to this exact case at the end of this post, Benjamin. I seriously thought you were a social worker...there is a guy on here who is and I remembered wrong. Perhaps he's no longer on the board.
I have to agree about the vast differences in children that was brought up in the other thread. They don't all fit into the growth chart. For some, being off the chart size-wise may or may not be perfectly normal for them.
My own children are excellent examples. They all are given the same food, but all are very different in body build and weight. The heaviest one is the one who exercises frequently, jogs, plays team sports, etc.. The skinniest one is the least active. It's interesting to see!
Now a 200 lb 8 year old? It's not uncommon here in Oklahoma to see some VERY large children and yes, I've seen kids who appear to be that age and size in the schools.
What should parents do about this if there are no underlying physical causes?
I see a few reasons why a parent might have a very difficult time dealing with a child who has this issue.
1. Poverty. Poor people tend to buy foods that are cheap and filling. That includes lots of pasta, cheap white bread, peanut butter and jelly, etc.. The most affordable and filling foods are heavily processed and often contain chemicals and hormones. This is heavy and contributes to obesity.
2. Lack of exercise. A child is sitting in a classroom for the majority of their waking hours, five days a week. Gym is often no longer a requirement. Then they go home and do homework. If they're not self-motivated to exercise, what is there to do? I live in a major city. After school, the caregiver usually has worked all day, come home, and is in the house preparing dinner, doing housework, helping with homework, etc. and is not going to have the time to take the child out to a park to exercise or do exercise videos i the home.
3. What the parents know. Decent cooking is all too often a thing of the past. I repeatedly find parents who have no clue when it comes to preparing meals. They aren't teaching their kids how to cook either, because they don't know themselves. When my one daughter to take a home-ec class, I thought it was pretty cool. She came home TICKED because learning to bake a home-made cake consisted of learning to follow the directions on the box of cake mix. When they made tacos, the meat was precooked and they just heated it in the microwave. They baked a frozen pizza. On and on. That's how people are being taught. This is what Americans are doing...using unhealthy, prepared foods on a regular basis.
Add in single parents, lack of jobs, high stress, tons of demands on families for time, and then...add in the fact that many forms of discipline that may work on a child who refuses to follow a dietary plan are considered abuse. I know of one family with a child who was thin and getting unhealthy because they tried to feed him healthy and he decided to just not eat. The doctor told them to give him what he wanted so he had SOMETHING in him. Child wins, gets his way, stays unhealthy. Parents were told that it was against the law to withhold food in that case.
It goes the other way too. Kids who are overweight and refuse to eat healthy, sneak food at home, steal it from other places. One child I know with OCD hoards food and is addicted to sugar. She will steal it from anyone anywhere, get up at night and steal. The parents installed video cameras and alarms, but then DHS told the parents that it was an invasion of her privacy and asked the family to take down the alarms. While spanking and using a switch is legal in the state, it can't leave a mark and doesn't help. The social workers told the family that if the consequence makes the child uncomfortable (they were trying power sitting at the time) then they shouldn't use it.
The point is that DHS is overstepping, making rules that help make children unhealthy and disrespectful because it teaches kids that they have power over the parents because all they have to do is pick up the phone, and DHS comes and the parents get in trouble.
In this particular case with this boy? Let's pretend that DHS had a right to step in. Okay, great. They are to step in and offer services. Did they? It certainly doesn't appear that they did as much as they could. The parent was taking the child to a doctor and to a weight management program and what was accomplished in the program began to fail. DHS then removed the child, put him in foster care, and offered the foster parents help for their ward of the state that THEY DID NOT OFFER THE PARENT for the same child.
Since the goal of DHS is *supposed* to be to offer parents help they need and educate parents on proper care when the parents show a lack of knowledge for proper care, why did they not do that in this case? If the foster parent is better than the parent, why does DHS need to offer the foster parent options and support that they did not offer this child's mother? Logic says that if the parent is being abusive and the foster parent is not, then the child should thrive in foster care without services from DHS or at least only the same amount of services that DHS offered the family. The mom apparently was doing something right. This is an honor student. Honor students rarely just happen to pop up out of homes that are truly abusive. This, along with the mother's working with DHS as much as she did, leads me to believe that this is a parent who simply could have used the same services that DHS is now offering the foster home. Then when those services work, DHS will use it against the parent to prove that removing the child was beneficial and further proof that he was neglected in the home.
That's wrong.
The family should have been offered the same services first in this case.
Why didn't that happen?
Now, I do have to add something about parenting. When it comes to food, where do we draw the line on what is abuse and what isn't? We can SEE overweight. We can see underweight.
We can't physically look and see if a kid who appears to be perfectly normal is really quite ill inside from a poor diet or at risk of becoming so. I have seen school lunches that are simply horrid. I believe that my stepdaughter's school abused her and caused her physical harm during a party where she came home stuffed with cookies, cake and candy. She knew better than to eat all that, so when she came home with her eyes glazed over and very quiet, I wasn't sure why because she didn't tell me until later. Now I know that next time I see her like that, I need to take her to the doctor because she very likely had a dangerous amount of sugar in her blood. Some of the parties at school are insane in what they offer kids. I've seen a table for a class of 24 kids, 7-8 years old, loaded with stuff each kid brought in. Each one expected to bring in 24 servings. Cupcakes, cake, packets of candy, cans of soda, cookies, chips, donuts, you name it. The kids end up with 24 different junk foods, and you know that the serving sizes are typically way too big for the average 7-8 year old.
Why isn't DHS stepping into the schools to stop this insanity?
What about the epidemic of kids reaching puberty at ridiculously early ages and the refusal of many to relate it to what it is...a diet of foods pumped full of growth hormones, chemicals, and other drugs? People have little to no control over what is sold in the grocery store. In TONS of places, buying organic is too expensive for an average family to afford. Even a kid on what appears to be a healthy diet may actually be very unhealthy. There are kids who eat nothing but junk and don't get overweight, but they do have vitamin deficiencies and/or are causing long term damage to their bodies. This is just as bad as being overweight or underweight, provided that the definition of over and under is not just according to the growth chart, but takes the child's body type and family history into consideration.
Not exercising is bad for a kid. What about a child who is out of shape? What about a child whose eyes are being destroyed by hours of video games and television? There are so many ways to be physically unhealthy in ways that will have ill effects on the body, so why focus only on the ones that can be suspected because of physical appearances?
Maybe, just maybe, the problems in this country with overweight kids could be helped not by DHS workers, but could start with better regulation of the nation's food supply. Stop giving animals growth hormones and drugs, stop with genetically modified foods, and by all means make sure that foods have warning labels that let people know this is what the food contains and is so that people know what they are feeding their families.
That's where to start. Not with DHS. DHS is not the solution to overweight children.
