Posted on 07/14/2011 8:51:10 AM PDT by goodwithagun
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at shine.yahoo.com ...
Thank you, allmendream. Exactly.
“Cat food” and “dog food” are not natural to those animals.
Don’t forget the summer “feeding programs” offered by public schools.
Should Dems lose custody of a super-obese government?
The case can be made that Democrats need to lose custody of "the poor" if obesity is just-cause to terminate parental rights.
Do you realize what you are saying? Taking a child away from the parents is serious business. If they are going to give the money and the tools to the foster parents to help the child lose weight, why can’t they do that for the family?
I know of children taken because of ‘neglect’. They were living in a car. The children were fed and clean but they didn’t have housing. They paid foster parents to take care of the children but they couldn’t help the struggling parents with housing.
I also just saw a new story of a family that lost their children because they didn’t have running water.
There are only a few cases where children need to be removed and obesity isn’t one of them.
A 90 pound 3 year old is well beyond obesity, but as I said, where do you draw the line?
That child needs to be in a different environment and those parent(s) should not be allowed to have kids, you cannot convince me otherwise. The slippery slope argument is the only thing that keeps me from thinking government should intervene. That child is 3 years old and already has almost no chance of being successful in anything.
What if it's genetic? What if it's virus induced like the UK studies indicate?
What if foster care doesn't improve the child's obesity? Does the child get to go back to their parents?
Are there less drastic alternatives, like placing a live in counselor with the family, to observe family habits, and to teach the family how to make proper choices?
Or even less drastic requiring the family to attend education? or enroll in a supervised weight loss program.
Foster care should be a last resort.
The first autopsy I ever saw in medical school was that of a 13 year old boy that was allowed by his parents (they owned a restaurant) to eat himself to death.
His liver was canary yellow from the fat infiltration and, to weight it, it had to be cut up in different pieces so that the pieces could fit on the meat scale. (An adult liver of a 6 foot, 230 pound man fits on the scale just fine.) The cause of death was "hepatorenal syndrome" where there is multisystem failure because the liver can no longer perform it's needed functions.
It all boils down to plain, old common sense.
The majority on this thread are against "Government interference in our private lives". That is a good argument for simply a "fat kid". On the other hand, a 90 pound 3 year old is a "dead kid walking". That crosses the common sense line just like this other case now being discussed on FR.
Mother arrested for 'leaving her children in hot car and attacking woman trying to rescue them'
"Well, yeah, but anybody knows that leaving kids in a closed car with 88 degree temperatures will kill them in the immediate future."
Yes, and anybody with medical training and experience knows that allowing a 3 year old to balloon to 90 pounds will kill it in the immediate future. Without even doing a liver biopsy, I can tell you what color that kid's liver is: It is canary yellow.
Allowing a parent to engage in behavior that is guaranteed to kill the child in nothing more that a "Pro-Choice" stance.
“That child needs to be in a different environment and those parent(s) should not be allowed to have kids,”
Wow just wow!
People who are a little bit overweight have lower overall medical expenses than people who are at the "ideal" weight, if that is going to be your metric. People who are very overweight, obviously have more health problems. It would be interesting to see if a shorter lifespan offsets these problems to lower lifetime medical costs.
In any case, it should be offensive to any free person that we are having this conversation at all. The givernment should have no part in paying for medical care, because such an arrangement is incompatible with freedom. Once they are picking up the bill, every aspect of every citizen's life becomes a legitimate interest of the government.
Agreed. I don’t think people here understand exactly what a 90 pound 3 year old is. This isn’t the run of the mill fat kid in the neighborhood.
This is a fascinating case but our information is incomplete. What I want to know is: are the parents of this child themselves wards of the State?
As a conservative I don’t believe the state should be in the business of housing, feeding, or clothing anyone (that’s what private charity should be for, in cases of extremis). If the parents aren’t on the public dole, the state has no business in their family lifestyle or decisions.
If on the other hand, the parent(s) of the child in question have allowed themselves to become “children” of the state, in effect declaring themselves incapable of providing for their own basic needs, should the state assume them to be competent in the area of child rearing? If this situation is true, then the state should step in because their bad decisions are going to cost us even more money, in the form of medical maintenance and repair that are associated with this level of obesity. Of course it goes without saying that if the child must be removed, the child-care payments to the older “children” in this story should be immediately stopped.
under President Bush they were starving. How can they get super obese so quick?
Yes, medical care will become a “privledge of the state”, like a driver’s license. They will be able to successfully use the same arguments in court to control any and all aspects of life. If they can randomly stop you and force you to take breathalizers and field sobriety tests, what is to stop them from randomly coming in your home and searching your fridge for alcohol and fatty foods or searching your desk drawer for cigarettes?
This is a fascinating case but our information is incomplete. What I want to know is: are the parents of this child themselves wards of the State?
As a conservative I don’t believe the state should be in the business of housing, feeding, or clothing anyone (that’s what private charity should be for, in cases of extremis). If the parents aren’t on the public dole, the state has no business in their family lifestyle or decisions.
If on the other hand, the parent(s) of the child in question have allowed themselves to become “children” of the state, in effect declaring themselves incapable of providing for their own basic needs, should the state assume them to be competent in the area of child rearing? If this situation is true, then the state should step in because their bad decisions are going to cost us even more money, in the form of medical maintenance and repair that are associated with this level of obesity. Of course it goes without saying that if the child must be removed, the child-care payments to the older “children” in this story should be immediately stopped.
I’m not convinced that we understand genetics well enough to say confidently that genetics would only account for 30% of an obese child’s obesity.
On the other hand, I am in favor of the state intervening to help the child. I just think there are a lot of options short of foster care that should be explored first.
As a conservative, I see the same "civic" duty that our founding fathers saw, that includes state care for the indigent, poor and needy. Research the Colonial Poor Laws some time.
Also read what scripture has to say about the "poor" and the "needy". There are at least 2 places where scripture said that a king's rule was to be cut short because they didn't take care of the poor. If "We the People" want to continue to rule, we better be considering that.
It needs to be balanced, it needs to be reasonably fraud proofed, but we don't need to shirk our duty, just because our leaders led us into the worse economy since the great depression.
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