When CPS takes children away from parents it's for a reason. Just as a child should be taken away from a parent who malnourished and too thin and unhealthy. A five year old needs to be taken away if they are overfed/ extremely over weight IS ABUSE. It has nothin to do with a beauty ideal. My neighbor got her 4 year old taken away bc she weighed almost 100 pounds that's not natural or thin privilege it's common sense. Stop being wrapped up in your own insecurities and spreading misinformation

Asked by

0livejews

Talking about spreading misinformation, the assumption you’re making is that fat children deemed “too fat” by some bureaucrat are that way because they’re being “overfed.” While, in many cases of extremely fat children, they have a disorder that has nothing to do with being “overfed,” and/or the State takes them under their all-knowing wing and their weight doesn’t change in custody, and so on.

Hurting a child is abuse, including forcing them to eat too much or too little. However, that’s a behavior. Fatness is a state, not a behavior. And to equate a state with a behavior is plain wrong. Also, there’s controversy in the literature about whether taking children from their parents is helpful to the child unless there is clear-cut, damaging abuse.

Also — and I’d like to address this because I’m extremely pro-autonomy for everyone, including children — it’s a point of personal philosophy that children need to be owned, either by their parents or by the State (or both), and the degree to which they need their choices and lives managed. There are more than a few stories on this blog about how being a fat kid whose diet was being managed by our parents or the State contributed to severe, long-lasting physical and psychological problems.

And you know what? We don’t know a lot about how manipulating children’s diets will affect them in the long run. Some people say that you can effectively stunt growth in weight, but to actually make that happen seems to require a famine state that also stunts growth in height. Some people say you need to target kids for weight loss at particular periods of their lives (for girls this often coincides with their entrance into puberty, which is itself highly suspect), but there are others who say that it’s normal for kids’ weights to fluctuate, especially before growth spurts, and that you can’t assume a chubby kid will turn into a chubby adult, etc. There are other people who say that putting kids on diets can mess up their hormonal and metabolic profiles permanently, potentially making them fatter. There are many nutritionists who say that kids should learn to eat intuitively, not from a food plan or journal.

So equating fatness over a certain threshold with abuse is

1) wrong,

2) begs a solution that is based on shaky science

Also, who made you dictator? You do realize how harmful it is to take a child away from their main caretakers, right? You can’t just scan a crowd and go, “Too skinny, too fat, too skinny” and yank kids away and put them in some kind of re-nutrition institute. Your comment sounds extremely immature and intellectually unrigorous, and I suggest you think a little more deeply about the issue before letting your sense of self-righteous indignity get away from you.

-ArteToLife