Yahoo Lifestyle Harvard Researchers Want Fat Kids Taken From Their Homes
As suggested solutions to combat childhood obesity become increasingly dramatic – did anyone catch the British idea a week ago telling parents to make sure their pre-schoolers get a minimum of three hours exercise a day? – Harvard researchers want to take obese kids away from their parents.
They’re not kidding, either. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, two Harvard researchers put forward a case for taking custody rights away from parents whose children are very obese.
"Despite the discomfort posed by state intervention, it may sometimes be necessary to protect a child," says lawyer/Harvard School of Public Health researcher Lindsey Murtagh.
Study co-researcher and obesity specialist David Ludwig says the forced removal "ideally will support not just the child but the whole family, with the goal of reuniting child and family as soon as possible."
Ludwig points to a 3-year-old girl weighing 40kg who came to his obesity clinic a few years ago. Her physically disabled parents were struggling financially and couldn’t control her weight. By the time she was 12, she weighed 181kg, and had diabetes, sleep apnoea, high blood pressure and cholesterol issues.
"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. Within a year, she lost 58 pounds. Though she is still obese, her diabetes and apnoea disappeared; she remains in foster care, he says.
Thankfully the medical community isn’t in agreement on this one!
University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Art Caplan feels this sort of solution lays too much blame at the feet of parents, explaining childhood obesity is a response to advertising, marketing, peer pressure and bullying, which are elements parents can’t necessarily control.
"If you're going to change a child's weight, you're going to have to change all of them," Caplan says, outlining the three major problems with the suggested policy of removing obese children from their parents’ home:
Legality. "Our laws give enormous authority to parents and rightly so," he writes. "The only basis for compelling medical treatment against a parent’s wishes are if a child is at imminent risk of death — meaning days or hours — and a proven cure exists for what threatens to kill them. Obesity does not pass these requirements. The risk of death from obesity is real, but it is way down the road for kids."
Practicality. The number of kids involved — an estimated 2 million children with body-mass index above the 99th percentile — would quickly swamp already overwhelmed social service departments," he writes. "And, no matter what you do with overweight children, sooner or later they are going back home where their often overweight parents will still be."
It's actually the wrong focus. "Before we start grabbing porky youths out of their homes and sending them off to government fat camps, might we try to change our food culture? This means doing what we have done for smoking. Demonize the companies that sell and market food that is not nutritious. That means you, candy, soda, fried food and snack food outfits. Tax them too."
What do you think? Do your children struggle with their weight despite your best intentions? Do you struggle to cover the cost of fresh produce? Or do you think parents need to be accountable for their child’s health, including their weight?
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