More Examples of Child Removal

In South Carolina, a 14-year-old boy who weighed 555 pounds was taken from his mother’s custody in 2009, and placed in foster care. Furthermore, the mother was arrested on a charge of criminal neglect. In 2011, in Ohio, an eight-year-old boy who tipped the scales at more than 200 pounds was removed, on grounds of neglect, from his mother, to a foster home.

In Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, a father of two boys reportedly played a lot of video games and had grown cannabis in the past, and also had weighed as much as 525 pounds. He was estranged from the kids’ mother, who apparently was ineligible for custody for some reason. The kids were taken away and put up for adoption.

Journalist Carly Weeks wrote,

The story of the custody battle… raises questions about the role an individual’s weight plays in his or her ability to function, and at what point it becomes detrimental to taking care of oneself and others… Of course, the man’s weight was only one factor in the judge’s decision.

The father had never been abusive to the kids, and had a stable life except for his weight-loss effort, which had brought him down to 380. Sadly, the judge used that success against the parent, saying there would be no room for the boys, because to pay the bills he would have to take in roommates; and also noted that losing major weight is a full-time job. In consequence,

The man has told several media outlets he is being discriminated against because of his weight and that he wants to go on a hunger strike to protest the decision.

In England, the child welfare authorities ostensibly are committed to working with families first. If the situation does not improve in good time, they take more stringent measures, including removal in “extreme cases.”

In 2007, in Great Britain, an eight-year-old girl who weighed 140 pounds was taken from her family and placed “into care.” In the same year and country, a media uproar took place over Connor McCreadie.

With children as young as 10 months requiring hospital admission for obesity-related problems, the situation was becoming dire. In 2012, five kids in Britain were taken from their parents, and in 2013, another five.

In 2015, Idaho’s House of Representatives was in a tizzy over a proposed bill that sought to curtail parental rights. Many of the state’s citizens were already upset that the government usurped their fundamental right to let their children have tattoos and piercings. Now, the state hoped to forbid tanning bed sessions for 14-year-olds and younger. Even 17-year-olds would need to bring a signed permission slip.

Here is the problem. Any law of this type “substitutes the judgment of lawmakers for the judgment of parents, and suggests that their judgment is superior.” (Thanks to this robust belief, in Idaho there is no minimum age for marriage.)

Speaking of these transgressions, writer Wayne Hoffman insists that prohibition doesn’t work, and that kids still smoke and drink anyway. And, most importantly, a parent’s rights are sacred! Hoffman suggests sarcastically,

Perhaps lawmakers will next target childhood obesity — also highly deadly — and ban kids from chugging soda or eating fast food. Maybe a Big Mac should require a parent’s signed permission slip.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Childhood Obesity in California Custody & Visitation Disputes,” BayAreaDivorceLawyerBlog.com, 03/29/12
Source: “Child Obesity Becoming a Legal Custody Issue,” SouthUniversity.edu, May 2012
Source: “Obese Ottawa man loses custody of children,” TheGlobeAndMail.com, 06/21/12
Source: “Social workers are weighing in and taking away children from parents who give in to their cravings and feed them too much,” DailyMail.co.uk, 12/28/13
Source: “Parental rights are sacred… except when they’re not,” IdahoFreedom.org, 02/27/15
Photo credit: Belzie on Visualhunt/CC BY-ND

Obesity and the Need to Affix Blame

This was Australia in 2012. Ashlee Mullany wrote for PerthNow,

Victoria’s welfare authority recently cited obesity in two child protection court cases, with both children later removed from their parents’ care. One case involved a pre-teenage boy who weighed 110kg [242.5 lbs] and the other a teenage girl whose waist circumference was greater than her height.

A major hospital stated that “obesity was one of several factors in a ‘handful’ of patients” whom the institution had contacted child welfare authorities about. The Health Department had already defined medical neglect as failure to get adequate care and treatment for a child. The government guidelines said,

In extreme cases of severe obesity, where parents seem unable or unwilling to adhere to management programs aimed at weight loss for their affected child, the question arises as to whether this is a form of medical neglect.

Medical practitioners were warned about what to watch out for. If health services have already worked with the parent/s extensively — yet the child’s untrammeled weight gain continues — that is a mark in the “Against” column. If the parents’ behavior actively sabotages the treatment plan, that is another bad grade. The important question is, does the tendency toward neglect show up in other aspects of the child’s development? For instance, what is the level of emotional abuse?

Sad to say

In dramatic films, there are people with bad intentions, who seek to gain control over others by addicting them to something. That sort of thing happens in real life, too. Compulsive overeating is addiction’s fraternal twin. Overconsumption leads to obesity. An obese child is easy to create, and to manipulate.

Obese kids can be made to feel very inadequate. Low self-esteem can be cultivated in them. Low self-esteem people are easy to control. Not all parents are in the peak of mental health. Many things go on, that bespeak the need for more psychiatrists and psychologists and therapists in the obesity field.

Other places

Great Britain made international news in 2014 by arresting the parents of a 210-pound, 11-year-old boy whose father said, “Our son’s favorite snack is steamed broccoli — and he’s still big.” The mother told the press that both sides of the family were “genetically fat.” Eventually the parents were released on bail, and agreed to keep their child on a strict diet.

In the following year in Puerto Rico, a senator inspired controversy by proposing that when schools reported suspicious cases to the health department, and the government attempted to bring about change in the families of affected children, and failed, the parents would be fined. Additional fines could add up to as much as $800, which is a lot in Puerto Rico, just as it would be for most mainland American families.

Asked to comment, Rebecca Puhl, of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, brought up multifactorialism again, telling journalist Sydney Lupkin that the senator’s ideas would…

[…] drastically oversimplify obesity and are more likely to be harmful than incur any benefit…

Childhood obesity is a highly complex issue, and while the home environment is important to address, much broader societal changes are required to effectively address obesity.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Parents of obese children face fat police,” PerthNow.com, 08/04/12
Source: “Childhood Obesity Results In Parents’ Arrest,” Inquisitr.com, 06/09/14
Source: “Experts ‘Appalled’ by Puerto Rican Bill to Fine Parents of Obese Children,”
ABCNews.go.com, 02/11/15
Photo credit: Jangra Works on Visualhunt/CC BY

The Stakes of Child Removal

Childhood Obesity News is tracing the history of opinion, in English-speaking countries, about whether society should criminalize parents for letting their children get fat. Because leaving children in place and removing them from their homes both include possible hazards there does not appear to be an ideal answer.

It can be difficult to encourage parents to change and follow a new regime because the government says so. The parents might express their love inappropriately, like by overfeeding the child, but at least there is some presumption of genuine care. While institutions and foster home arrangements may be well-intentioned, kids tend to be miserable, and misery of course reinforces unhealthy coping strategies, like comfort eating.

Some bad numbers

In Great Britain, where the subject of the previous post, Connor McCreadie, lived, we are told that children who are under state protection for whatever reason wind up grossly overrepresented in the youth justice system. While “looked after” children are only about one percent of the country’s kids, they account for close to 40 percent of the kids who go on to the “secure training centers,” which house juvenile delinquents between 12 and 17 years old.

Then, those who previously were in care proceed to make up about 25 percent of the adult prison population — even though they started out in the pool representing only one percent of the total child population. Also, they are twice as likely to be repeat offenders. So the authorities really need to think twice before taking kids. And yet, it happens. In 2011, a Scottish couple had four of their seven children removed by the state because of extreme obesity.

Across the pond

In the United States, a similar variety of unsatisfactory solutions existed, from kinship care and foster homes to group homes, and the outcomes of staying with a strange family or an institution do not seem very different. Two factors predict a longer stay in the system, one of which is a chronic health problem, which morbid obesity qualifies as.

So if an obese child were removed from the family of origin, the time away would probably be quite lengthy. One academic examination of such matters concluded:

Given findings from multiple studies which have shown that many children are in residential care for reasons other than their clinical needs, child welfare systems and practitioners are urged to carefully review the justification for a child’s initial and continued placement in residential care. However, as indicated earlier, much more needs to be understood about these factors before policy recommendations can be made.

In the relatively recent past, no attention was paid to how overweight kids reacted to being removed from their homes. They were in the system, but had gotten there for other reasons, and obesity was not seen as a special case. Then, it became a hot-button topic.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Looked-after Children,” SMF.co.uk, August 2018
Source: “Scots children taken into care over fears of rising weight as childhood obesity crisis spirals out of control,” DailyMail.co, 03/03/14
Source: “Residential Care for Youth in the Child Welfare System: Stop-Gap Option or Not?,” NIH.gov, 02/07/12
Photo credit: Danijel-James Wynyard on Visualhunt/CC BY

The State vs. Killing Them Softly

Childhood Obesity News mentioned Connor McCreadie, the British 8-year-old whose case was the first to stir public interest in identifying obesity enablement as child abuse. He weighed almost four times as much as he should have, and people pointed out that if the opposite were the case, if he only weighed one-fourth of his ideal weight, there would be no question about the appropriateness of government intervention.

People also remarked that if the boy were instead a horse or a dog, authorities would have jumped in long ago, to remove him from the care of his single mother and have him placed in some kind of alternate situation.

Those takes were typical of the what-aboutism that fresh controversy always inspires, and so is this quotation from an opinion piece by Jan Moir in The Telegraph:

Sometimes I wonder about these “authorities”, who seem to let malnourished children stippled with cigarette burns and mottled with fresh bruises skip back into the arms of their parental abusers with alarming regularity, while indulging in this modish obsession with obesity instead.

Although a lot of kids are victims of serious crimes that don’t leave visible scars, obese children are comparatively easier to identify. Moir implied this by comparing the social services intake mechanism to elephant hunting, chasing the cumbersome and slow-moving target.

But the making of that very point is another instance of the same fallacy; of going after the low-hanging fruit, or shooting fish in a barrel. It is inescapably true that no matter what a well-intentioned government bureau does critics can always come along and point to worse atrocities that go unaddressed.

Then the believers in state intervention say, “At least some suffering is being alleviated, even if we can’t get to it all.” And no human institution is perfect, and how should limited resources best be used, and so on, and the squabbling can continue all day.

Moir characterized Connor as “a miserable little boy entombed in a block of blubber.” As a minor and virtually immobilized child, he was obviously being purposely and grossly overfed by the woman Moir theorized about, scolded, and commiserated with:

Perhaps, as a single mother struggling with depression and her own weight problems, this situation has become so wretched because there is not much else in life Nicola can give her son except food.

How could she let things slip to the extent that her young son has become so fat that he cannot put on his own socks, or speak without wheezing, or take any meaningful form of exercise?

Mother and son seem to be locked together in a spiral of mutual despair, unable to help each other out of this pit of bad food and misery.

Of course, members of the public had their ideas, like locking the refrigerator and letting Connor go hungry unless he ate his veggies — tough love, in other words. But if his mum had the capacity to practice tough love, why had she not started long before? At any rate, the government allowed that she could keep custody as long as Connor observed a strict diet, and the family seems to have stayed out of the news since then.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Time for tough love and a lock on the fridge,” Telegraph.co.uk, 02/28/07
Photo on Visualhunt

Parents and the Law

In the movement to hold parents of obese children legally responsible for neglect and damage, Connor McCreadie of North Tyneside, England, was “patient zero.” In 2007, the 8-year-old weighed perilously close to 200 pounds, and local government officials noticed. The authorities threatened to “place him in care” as the British say, where he would be one of the LAC, or looked-after children, of whom there are around 70,000 in any given year. But a great many more pass through the system annually, to the tune of about 100,000.

How do they become looked-after children? Why are they nominated for possible removal from their families, and placement into children’s homes, foster care, secure institutions, special placements, or even permanent adoption? Sometimes, it’s because they have already experienced physical and/or psychological trauma and need immediate protection.

Sometimes, it’s because they are deemed to be at risk due to parental instability or neglect. At some point, it became feasible to define obesity as a condition that the state should be concerned with.

British family court judge Stephen Wildblood told a reporter that the mothers whose children are removed from their custody need care and compassion also, because “It is the backlog of profound emotional damage that the mother has suffered that causes the vulnerabilities in her parenting.”

Clinical psychologist Dr. Freda Gardner told the press that the parents suffer trauma and loss, adding, “Many are desperate for help and engage well with the right treatment when it’s provided.” On the opposing side, intolerant critics protest, saying never mind the mothers, just worry about the poor kids.

Journalist Louise Tickle quoted a mother who had lost two children to the system:

I don’t want any more children because if I do, and I managed to keep it, I don’t want Jamie or Harley saying: “Why did you change for that baby, but you couldn’t change for me?”

However, that woman was atypical, and here comes the reason — aside from common humanity and moral duty — why mothers need treatment. Tickle wrote:

It is now well understood that women whose children are taken from them by social services will frequently keep having babies to replace those they have lost… Some women have had four, five, six and more children removed.

In other words, mothers hunger so strongly for their babies that, to fill the emotional void left by the missing child or children, they often reproduce again at the earliest opportunity. Unless circumstances and parenting skills have improved, these substitute babies will also be taken, to replenish the ranks of children brought up on taxpayer funds. So, for the sake of national finances, the incentive to help the mothers get their lives in order should be quite compelling.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Is ‘Fatsploitation’ fuelling the obesity crisis?,” Independent.co.uk/, 07/20/09
Source: “Looked-after Children,” SMF.co.uk, August 2018
Source: “Are we failing parents whose children are taken into care?,” TheGuardian.com, 04/25/15
Photo credit: Ermadz X on Visualhunt/CC BY