Morbidly obese children put in foster care - good idea?Follow

Have her ride them around like a plump pony.

I think a better use of government dollars and time would be to assign the family a nutritionist. It costs a state $600-1000 a month to place a single child in foster care, but a nutritionist-counselor would be able to service ten families a month for the same cost. Someone to show them how to cook healthy meals at home, plan out grocery lists or hell, even do their shopping for the first couple of weeks just to clean out their fridge. Sort of an Extreme Makeover for their pantries.

I've struggled with obesity all my life, and it didn't help that I was a bookworm whose mother's idea of dinner was a giant pot of spaghetti on the stove for three or four hours while the 6+ members of my household came in and out from work and school and play. Portion control? What's that? We had no fresh fruits or vegetables around - if I wanted an apple, the best I could get was apple sauce. My mother's idea of vegetables was "cook em til they're gray and soggy and tasteless." I had to wait until I left home to discover the pleasures of fresh fruits, steamed vegetables, and properly balance meals.

Does this mean I would have done better at a foster home? Hell no. They literally did not know any better - my mother had never taken a cooking class in her life, and my father grew up on a farm where all the extra calories would be expended in one afternoon's worth of hard labor.

A little education will go a long, long, long way.

Well, we'd need McDonald's to subsidize them, of course.

Food isn't crack, and it's not illegal to give it to kids.

It's important that obesity is recognized as a societal problem, but it can't be dealt with by disallowing personal choice of how much we eat. I think even the laws against the fast food places having to put in veggies with kids meals and what-not are pretty sketchy.

It's hard to know what's gone on with this family. Why was the kid originally taken away?

If this case is severe enough for a doc or two to declare the kid has a life-threatening condition that requires immediate medical attention and the parents fail to provide it, then that would be child abuse/neglect and should be dealt with as such (separate from whatever the kid was first removed from the home for). Then if the courts are going to take it on, I'd think maybe they could demand that the parents get the medical help the kid needs.

In general though, one can't say obese kids are neglected or abused (or what Joph said).

I'm pretty sure that would count as child ****.

There's really no exhaustive list of what you're not allowed to feed your children. It's just generally accepted that cyanide, ******** lead, etc., are poisonous and if you give them to your child, it's murder. But those same substances are found in everyday foods at nonlethal doses. The lethality of a substance is almost always a question of quantity, and most any substance can be lethal when consumed at a sufficient quantity.

Basically, it's my opinion that the parents are killing the kid, and the child's wellbeing supersedes their right to raise him. If you can't even manage not seriously fucking up your kid by exercising the least bit of control over what they do and do not put in their mouth, you aren't fit to be a parent, period.

Okay, orphanage story. Most of the kids in our orphanage were obese. The ones who were morbidly obese got sent to an eating disorder clinic. We had our food rationed, but people would just spend their pocket money on more, and the clinic everyone got sent to was not all that successful.

Funny thing is, for fat kids it was the clinic or just doing nothing if they really didn't want it. For the anorexic kids it was the clinic or getting kicked out of the orphanage. They could do this because we were one of the best orphanages in town. But talk about unfair treatment...


But yeah, basically I could go on a rant about health care and giving kids a chance to go to such a clinic even if it doesn't necessarily stop all self destructive behaviour, but that would be going on a tangent.

Actually the stuff my housemates picked up from that clinic was fairly simple. Don't graze constantly. Replace the butter on your sandwich with ketchup to cut down on calories. Eat your goddamn vegetables. You don't need to become a nutritionist to develop reasonable eating habits.

That being said, parents should just stop giving their children chips and Pepsi and onion rings.
Around here, half the young adults seem to have some serious issues with eating anything that isn't profoundly unhealthy. They only eat my vegan food because I disguise it. It's like these people have this weird healthy food = bad and disgusting mentality and can't shake it. It was actually the same in the orphanage, but those sorts of places were the only environments where I saw that sort of behaviour back in Germany; everywhere else, people just had a balanced diet without any issues.

I'm trying to decide if that is worse or better than mayonnaise. Will people people just smear any flavorless fattening goop on their sandwich? Is there something about the texture of *** that improves the experience?

Edited, Jul 16th 2011 10:32pm by Allegory

For what it's worth, mayonnaise has 49 calories in 1 tbsp, versus ketchup's 15 and butter's 102.

We stopped at a Subway one day in Dublin and I asked for mustard on my turkey sandwich. I ended up with honey mustard. WTF?

Its not always the parents that are to blame for heavy kids. I think I hit 160 when I was 13 (before hitting an equilibrium of 260 or so in high school). My parents tried to get me to eat healthy, but I found ways to get what I want. Mom ran out to the store? Raid the fridge for something to eat. Birthday money? Time to go buy candy. I wasn't shy about asking kids at school "are you going to finish that?"

On the other hand, there are parents that contribute to their childs problems. On of my moms co-workers would make her 8 year daughter an entire corned beef brisket. She did this because she couldn't say no to her beautiful unique sneauxflake. My mom told me no and that was the end of the story, hence the sneaking around.

I think catwho has the right idea of having a nutritionist work with the families if there is a legitimate issue. I feel shuffling a kid around to foster care because hes fat will be more damaging in the long run. Besides, what do some people do when they are emotionally hurt? Eating is always an attractive option to make yourself feel better.

By "fattening goops," I meant condiments which contain significant amounts of lipids, in this case butter and mayonnaise. I was not referring to condiments that do not contain significant amounts of lipids, specifically not ketchup.

There are also plenty of oil-based dressings that are healthy on their own merits. I'm not much for "goops" myself, either, but I wouldn't manage to eat my vegetables without a little butter and oil to taste (I actually recommend an oil spread like Smart Balance instead of butter). However, talking about sandwiches and things, I completely agree. Surely there's something more flavorful and nutritious you can add to your meat on bread.