SERIOUSLY ANNOYED!!!
I read the entire article -- and it really was speaking to only the very severest of cases. The examples given included serious medical complications where the family wouldn't, or couldn't, comply with directions from the medical establishment to help the child. They were not talking about a child who was 20lbs overweight. Sorry to disagree - but these were cases where intervention was appropriate.
I have 4 children. 1 was always over weight, 2 underweight, and 1 average. I can tell you from experience that their doctor was always much more concerned with the underweight children. I would expect that had the situation with them progressed -- that I had not followed advice for weight gain that the state would have intervened -- isn't it the same thing?
I think all of it, underweight or overweight needs to be looked at on an individual basis. I don't think that blanket statements are ever healthy. What if the underweight child was found to simply have a high metabolism, or just not fit in with the "average" number. Why is there always this need to all be the same? If you are fatter than the majority, fix it, if you are paler, get tan, if you have less money..earn more. Why not be an individual unless there is a major health issue.
I also think education is best. My children as I stated do not always eat the best because of special needs. Are they in the morbidly obese category..no...is there BMI higher than it should be for their age level? Yes.
I am NOT proud of my weight...however...I do not have high blood pressure, I do NOT have high cholesterol, I do not have diabetes or high sugar levels and my statistics are that of a thin person. I am not promoting fat children. I am promoting children staying with their parents. Maybe a specialized parenting class, cooking classes, scholarship to the Y...whatever it takes to support the family as a unit instead of trying to punish the parent and do the child emotional harm. INSANE!!
Tracey :)CHICAGO (AP) — Should parents of extremely obese children lose custody for not controlling their kids' weight? A provocative commentary in one of the nation's most distinguished medical journals argues yes, and its authors are joining a quiet chorus of advocates who say the government should be allowed to intervene in extreme cases.
It has happened a few times in the U.S., and the opinion piece in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association says putting children temporarily in foster care is in some cases more ethical than obesity surgery.
Dr. David Ludwig, an obesity specialist at Harvard-affiliated Children's Hospital Boston, said the point isn't to blame parents, but rather to act in children's best interest and get them help that for whatever reason their parents can't provide.
State intervention "ideally will support not just the child but the whole family, with the goal of reuniting child and family as soon as possible. That may require instruction on parenting," said Ludwig, who wrote the article with Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and a researcher at Harvard's School of Public Health.
"Despite the discomfort posed by state intervention, it may sometimes be necessary to protect a child," Murtagh said.
But University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Art Caplan said he worries that the debate risks putting too much blame on parents. Obese children are victims of advertising, marketing, peer pressure and bullying — things a parent can't control, he said.
"If you're going to change a child's weight, you're going to have to change all of them," Caplan said.
Roughly 2 million U.S. children are extremely obese. Most are not in imminent danger, Ludwig said. But some have obesity-related conditions such as Type 2 diabetes, breathing difficulties and liver problems that could kill them by age 30. It is these kids for whom state intervention, including education, parent training, and temporary protective custody in the most extreme cases, should be considered, Ludwig said.
While some doctors promote weight-loss surgery for severely obese teens, Ludwig said it hasn't been used for very long in adolescents and can have serious, sometimes life-threatening complications.
"We don't know the long-term safety and effectiveness of these procedures done at an early age," he said.
Ludwig said he starting thinking about the issue after a 90-pound 3-year-old girl came to his obesity clinic several years ago. Her parents had physical disabilities, little money and difficulty controlling her weight. Last year, at age 12, she weighed 400 pounds and had developed diabetes, cholesterol problems, high blood pressure and sleep apnea.
"Out of medical concern, the state placed this girl in foster care, where she simply received three balanced meals a day and a snack or two and moderate physical activity," he said. After a year, she lost 130 pounds. Though she is still obese, her diabetes and apnea disappeared; she remains in foster care, he said.
In a commentary in the medical journal BMJ last year, London pediatrician Dr. Russell Viner and colleagues said obesity was a factor in several child protection cases in Britain. They argued that child protection services should be considered if parents are neglectful or actively reject efforts to control an extremely obese child's weight.
A 2009 opinion article in Pediatrics made similar arguments. Its authors said temporary removal from the home would be warranted "when all reasonable alternative options have been exhausted."
That piece discussed a 440-pound 16-year-old girl who developed breathing problems from excess weight and nearly died at a University of Wisconsin hospital. Doctors discussed whether to report her family for neglect. But they didn't need to, because her medical crisis "was a wake-up call" for her family, and the girl ended up losing about 100 pounds, said co-author Dr. Norman Fost, a medical ethicist at the university's Madison campus.
State intervention in obesity "doesn't necessarily involve new legal requirements," Ludwig said. Health care providers are required to report children who are at immediate risk, and that can be for a variety of reasons, including neglect, abuse and what doctors call "failure to thrive." That's when children are severely underweight.
Jerri Gray, a Greenville, S.C., single mother who lost custody of her 555-pound 14-year-old son two years ago, said authorities don't understand the challenges families may face in trying to control their kids' weight.
"I was always working two jobs so we wouldn't end up living in ghettos," Gray said. She said she often didn't have time to cook, so she would buy her son fast food. She said she asked doctors for help for her son's big appetite but was accused of neglect.
Her sister has custody of the boy, now 16. The sister has the money to help him with a special diet and exercise, and the boy has lost more than 200 pounds, Gray said.
"Even though good has come out of this as far as him losing weight, he told me just last week, 'Mommy, I want to be back with you so bad.' They've done damage by pulling us apart," Gray said.
Stormy Bradley, an Atlanta mother whose overweight 14-year-old daughter is participating in a Georgia advocacy group's "Stop Childhood Obesity" campaign, said she sympathizes with families facing legal action because of their kids' weight.
Healthier food often costs more, and trying to monitor kids' weight can be difficult, especially when they reach their teens and shun parental control, Bradley said. But taking youngsters away from their parents "definitely seems too extreme," she said.
Dr. Lainie Ross, a medical ethicist at the University of Chicago, said: "There's a stigma with state intervention. We just have to do it with caution and humility and make sure we really can say that our interventions are going to do more good than harm."
This doctor is out of Boston which is disturbing because of course they are ranked "up there" as progressive medicine goes.
The school could def. step it up with allowing all grades to have recess and have activities that support more movement.
I agree totally on the cost of living raise...my grandfather could buy a new car with a months paycheck and a new house with a year's check. That is not even close to possible now. It takes 6 years to buy a car and a lifetime to pay off a house. I suppose if we all planted gardens we may be able to cut costs a little but it is hard to find the time.
I hope this doctor doesnt find anyone to really listen because I find it disturbing on more than one level. What would be next? Your child's grades are not good enough? They are not reading enough? They are not taught the correct religious beliefs? Where would it end? Hmmmm this type of control sounds familiar...scary?
I have been poor, and not momentarily. I have used food stamps and WIC to feed my kids, and when we couldn't qualify, I scraped out a shopping cart of food with whatever money I could find.
Fact: buying crap isn't any cheaper than buying real, healthy food. I know that from my personal experience of feeding a family of four on $60 a week for several years.
Produce, vegetables, are cheap and healthy. Meat can be stretched, and thanks to ongoing dairy subsidies, milk is affordable.
What is crazy expensive and unhealthy is the prepared, hi-fat, hi-sodium, hi-suger packaged stuff.
And I have watched tv show after show of parents trotting out their horrifically obese, overfed babies and toddlers, and parading them around, clearly proud of what they have done to their own childrens' bodies, as these babies stagger around under the weight of their own girth. Those kids are - thanks directly to the diet their parents feed them - at severely increased risk of all the obesity-related conditions we here at OH know entirely too well. Why are we putting the words obese and overfed in quotes when we talk about children? Is someone suggesting these conditions aren't possible or don't actually exist?
If I, as a mom, were to chose to seriously, consistantly underfeed my child, even after repeated warnings from his or her pediatircian that she was becoming dangerously underweight, fragile, and suffering from malnutrition, would anyone hesitate to say that I wasn't taking adequate care of my child, and that someone should step in for the sake of that child?
We are not talking about policing sweetly plump kids here. We are talking abotu the real issue of dangerously overfed children, and such children are found in every city. I can't believe I have to point out that childhood obesity is at an all-time high, and that it is a direct precursor to serious, even fatal health complications later. You simply can't feed your child into a state of obesity for the same reason you can't light her Marlboro and pour her a tumbler of scotch.
I'm sorry to say that I have a friend with two daughters, now 3 and 7, and their pediatrician actually had to threaten her with CPS to get her to take her daughters' weight issues seriously. Her two-year old weighed 71 pounds, and ate as much at every meal as her father, a construction worker. Mom, gramma, auntie would spend their days popping things into her mouth, pouring her bottle after bottle of juice, ("Juice is good for her!"), and she already was having blood suger problems, as well as breathing issues. Do they love that child? Of course they do. Would they have fed her into the hospital? Apparently so. The pediatrician warned them over and over, and all they could say was, "... but she wants it...".
At the risk of being flip, if she had wanted a loaded gun to play with...
He finally had to tell them clearly, and without mincing words, that they were actively destroying their girls with love, and tell them that he had an obligation to report this as abuse, before they really seemed to grasp the seriousness of the problem. And even now, with all this flare-up about the proposed law, there are parents rolling their dangerously obese babies out on the the talk show circuit.
That is all.
I am done.
Koko
HW-291 :: 1st WLS consult-281 :: Surgery-263 :: GW-154 :: CW-151 :: In my dreams - 138
5'10"
