So, I was watching The View (no gay jokes) and they were interviewing a young girl who had just lost 90lbs. Years earlier, her parents pulled her out of school because she was being teased for being overweight. They home-schooled her, bought her fast food three times a day, and let her lay around without getting any excercise. Predictably, her weight ballooned to over 250 pounds. To me, this sounds like child abuse. Allowing and enabling your child, who looks to you for guidance and direction, to eat fast food and gain enormous amounts of weight thereby putting their health and happiness in jeopardy is every bit as destructive and negligent as allowing your child to drink alcohol, have sex, and use drugs. In fact, since these parents were buying her fast food, it is, in my mind, the equivalent of giving your child alcohol, drugs, and providing them with sexual partners.
Am I being too judgmental? When I see overweight parents at the grocery store buying sugary cereals, pastries, and fatty fried foods for their overweight kids am I wrong for thinking that they ought to know better? Having presumably grown up overweight themselves, why would they condemn their children to the same fate? Aren't we, as parents, supposed to try to give our kids a better life than we had? If you were teased as a child for being obese and still have emotional scars as a result, why would you want your kids to experience the same pain? If you are now experiencing the health issues associated with a lifetime of obesity, why would you pass those same health issues on to your children?
I think this is abusive neglectful behavior. I see no difference between feeding greasy fast food to kids genetically predisposed to obesity and sharing a beer or a hit of cocaine with kids genetically predisposed to substance abuse. Do not pass your disease onto your children! It is your job as parents to protect them.
Soap box abandoned.
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- Wrath
- I am a writer, former fighter, former MMA trainer, husband, and father of three. I fought professionally for 9 years and trained fighters for 6. I may look mean as hell and write some gruesome stuff and am capable of beating most fools within an inch of their lives but I'm actually a nice guy. Really, I'm a Teddy bear. I am a humanist who believes in man's responsibility to his fellow man and that too many do too little for too few. I've been publishing for 10 years. Succulent Prey was my first mass-market release followed by The Resurrectionist. If you have a taste for extreme fiction with socio-political and philosophical messages that push boundaries, break taboos, and leave you thinking long after the book has ended then check out Teratologist co-written with Edward Lee, Poisoning Eros co written with Monica O-Rourke, my short story collection,The Book of A thousand Sins, His Pain my novella from Delirium Books, Hero my novella with J.F. Gonzalez from Bloodletting Books, Population Zero from Cargo Cult Press, Yaccub's Curse by Necro Books, and my latest, Everyone Dies Famous In A Small Town published by Thunderstorm Books.
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4 comments:
Couldn't agree more.
OMG, I think exactly the same thing! Fat parents going into McDonalds with their fat kids tells me that something is seriously wrong with these parents' grip on reality. Obesity is both a physical AND a mental health problem. Obese people can't get around as easily, have a greater risk of heart disease and many other illnesses, are exposed to prejudices that deny them employment opportunities, and have reduced life spans. Parents are doing their kids no favors by over-feeding them. It IS abuse, in my opinion.
I read a story about a seven-year-old girl whose weight ballooned to 400 pounds because her stupid mother let her eat anything she wanted. Her legs bowed and her ankles gave out, so she had to scoot around on the floor. She gasped for breath just hauling her huge body onto a couch. It was pathetic and entirely the mother's fault. Sadly, this is not an isolated case, but seems to be getting more common.
I agree it's abuse :) My husband was overweight growing up and unfortunately my youngest son has my husband's body type. We're very very concerned with what we eat and bring in to the house to eat and how often we exercise because we don't want our son to face the same struggles my husband faced as a pudgy kid.
What frightens me is seeing how many of my son's classmates are morbidly obese and what they eat at school.
I've sat down with my son and had several frank talks about "this is why you're fat." and been told it's child abuse to do so. I think it's more abusive to let them think being greatly overweight is okay/healthy. Sitting down and having a conversation about weight, food choices, exercise choices etc isn't mean!
I guess the problem is the parents don't see it as a problem. They don't think of being fat as something expecially bad, they see it as just how they are. I lost a fair bit of weight in high school (thanks in part to my mum, a doctor, telling me that I was just barely below the threshold for medical obesity) so I'm reasonably aware of what I eat, and you're an athlete so of course you're going to eat well, but if you don't think about food and nutrition for yourself you won't worry about it for your kids.
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