About the only "obese" case in my team's caseloads that I can recall was medical neglect - the teen/tween (she was maybe 12 or 13) was over 400 lbs and diabetic, and her mom was not keeping tabs on her diabetes at all (testing her glucose levels, helping her make good food choices, etc) and the girl had to be hospitalized because of it. But just being overweight in and of itself is NO reason for a neglect referral!
Something else that people tend to forget (including me when I made this post) is that some kids who have various developmental disabilities are also quite large and heavy, and often lack emotional self-control to a degree that makes for serious safety problems. Sometimes services have to be called in in those instances because the parents (or siblings) are in danger from the child. (For a lot of the programs I work with, this precise scenario is why the child is in the program.)
Oh yes, we had one other girl in state's care because she lacked emotional self-control AND was quite large, in addition to having borderline IQ (around upper 70's or low 80's IIRC). She loved to use her size to bully people, including her parents, which was the main reason she was in care.
What happened to medically studying the problem without judgment? European studies are way ahead of us there; they've already admitted that obesity is something which can be completely hereditary (usually accompanied by other metabolic disorders like mine --- which CAUSED diabetes, not the other way around
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Unless you're physically feeding your children in the same manner that we feed ducks to make fois gras, I can't see how their weight could equal child abuse. And seriously, if you're using a FUNNEL, then we've got waaaaaaay bigger child abuse indicators than the number on the scale, you know?
I couldn't even finish reading that article. The "Hey, let's not judge people because of their weight because a) we don't know the whole story and it rarely actually means they're unhealthy/lazy/etc and b) it's none of our business anyway!" mentality has recently caused me a lot of grief -- obviously I subscribe to this mentality, and I post a lot of links/articles/etc on Facebook/Twitter/etc, and an old friend just sent me a message asking me (seriously) what was wrong with judging people because of their weight, so I've kind of been on a rampage about it for the past week or so (even more than usual), because that really pissed me off
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There are SO DAMN MANY people who define "abuse" as "not parenting in the way I would choose to parent" that it's not even funny. It's incredibly depressing and has a lot to do with my brain broke from trying to deal with the child welfare class from Hell at the same time as the CPS fiasco.
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About the only "obese" case in my team's caseloads that I can recall was medical neglect - the teen/tween (she was maybe 12 or 13) was over 400 lbs and diabetic, and her mom was not keeping tabs on her diabetes at all (testing her glucose levels, helping her make good food choices, etc) and the girl had to be hospitalized because of it. But just being overweight in and of itself is NO reason for a neglect referral!
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That's what brings it to that level.
Something else that people tend to forget (including me when I made this post) is that some kids who have various developmental disabilities are also quite large and heavy, and often lack emotional self-control to a degree that makes for serious safety problems. Sometimes services have to be called in in those instances because the parents (or siblings) are in danger from the child. (For a lot of the programs I work with, this precise scenario is why the child is in the program.)
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