This week an Ohio mom had her 7-year old 200 pound (90kg) child taken into foster care when she failed to help him meet health-related weight loss targets. Maybe it is extreme, but with childhood obesity having tripled over the last two decades, the health risks for our future generations are serious. Fundamentally we’re looking at the first generation in the last 100 years who has a lower life expectance than their previous generation.
South Africa obviously has far more serious issues like sexual abuse, malnutrition and childhood HIV to cope with and yet, third world countries also predicted as those which will be hardest hit by the rise in metabolic syndrome. Countries like Australia are discussing the responsibility of doctors to report childhood obesity to Child Protection Services.
Anybody who’s watched an episode of “Too fat for 15” will see that the issue of obesity is more systemic than simply the child. The parents are almost never pictures of perfect health themselves. Children in their earliest development phases have no real sense of ‘good’ from ‘bad’ food. Yes, some children are born with a preference for sweet foods, but really they have no judgement where food is concerned.
What makes it worse is that the ‘abusers’ are my own generation of peers. We were brought up on the ‘eat everything until your plate is empty’ policy. This, in addition to the guilt of the starving children in Ethiopia seems to have backfired in a way that makes us punish the next generation.
The issue really is that bad eating habits start incredibly early in life. These habits get harder to change with time. By the age of 7 or 8, a parent still has some control of their child’s eating, but certainly not as much as at earlier ages. Moreover, the parents may also need foster care – they’re probably not feeding themselves correctly either.
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