Too Fat for Fifteen

you may not like what I am going to say...but here goes.

the reason "fat" has a stigma attached to it is because deep down, we all know that fat is something you allowed to happen through bad choices (99% of the time, thyroid people I'm not talking to you). You kept eating, and not moving, until you reached "fat".

We hear "fat" but we think "lazy" because the two are connected in a causal relationship.

I agree. I got fat because I ate crap and didn't exercise. Still didn't make me feel any better about being called fat when I was a teenager. In fact, it most likely made me eat more.

By the way, "thyroid people I'm not talking to you" made me laugh. :laugh:

I was a chunky kid. Both parents had to work, and I pretty much was allowed to eat whatever I wanted. A little neglectful? Yes. Abuse?? Very far from it. My brother is close to 500 lbs, he is 40 years old and he still blames my parents for giving him whatever he wanted. I say, grow up! Youre a big boy. My parents did give him whatever he wanted, and sad to say, the way they handled us being overweight ( the word FAT is wrong..it just is..especially when u are speaking about or too a child) was just wrong.
So I ask parents this, what would you do if youre child ended up overweight anyway? You know, they get to a certain age when they can go out with friends and buy whatever treats they want. Do you put a teenager on a diet? Because in my mind, thats a type of abuse too. I was put on slim fast when I was 10 years old...insane, and stupid. My father ( who I love, but did make mistakes) would tease me and call me fat. That word hurts!! One min I am allowed to eat whatever, then all of a sudden, I am bigger than all the othetr kids and I have to drink slim fast? You wanna know what happened when he teased me and thought he was helping me with tough love? I gained a lot more. I didnt lose the weight untill I gotto college and realized my parents were wrong. I think the teasing was abuse, because it made everything a lot worse. I still remember some of the things that my father and other so called adults said to me. They burn in my memory.
So if you concider it abuse or not, thats up to you. You should know that there are many chubby kids out there with thin parents. IF it does happen, please make sure you handle it the right way. Its better for a kid to be chubby than for there self esteem to be ruined because their mom didnt think they were pretty enough. Get them into sports, cook healthy, but dont call them fat. Thats the WORST thing u can do. Putting them on a fad diet or much worse a TV show, could really ruin their self esteem. Im sad for them.

Amen. :flowerforyou:

I was a chunky kid. Both parents had to work, and I pretty much was allowed to eat whatever I wanted. A little neglectful? Yes. Abuse?? Very far from it. My brother is close to 500 lbs, he is 40 years old and he still blames my parents for giving him whatever he wanted. I say, grow up! Youre a big boy. My parents did give him whatever he wanted, and sad to say, the way they handled us being overweight ( the word FAT is wrong..it just is..especially when u are speaking about or too a child) was just wrong.
So I ask parents this, what would you do if youre child ended up overweight anyway? You know, they get to a certain age when they can go out with friends and buy whatever treats they want. Do you put a teenager on a diet? Because in my mind, thats a type of abuse too. I was put on slim fast when I was 10 years old...insane, and stupid. My father ( who I love, but did make mistakes) would tease me and call me fat. That word hurts!! One min I am allowed to eat whatever, then all of a sudden, I am bigger than all the othetr kids and I have to drink slim fast? You wanna know what happened when he teased me and thought he was helping me with tough love? I gained a lot more. I didnt lose the weight untill I gotto college and realized my parents were wrong. I think the teasing was abuse, because it made everything a lot worse. I still remember some of the things that my father and other so called adults said to me. They burn in my memory.
So if you concider it abuse or not, thats up to you. You should know that there are many chubby kids out there with thin parents. IF it does happen, please make sure you handle it the right way. Its better for a kid to be chubby than for there self esteem to be ruined because their mom didnt think they were pretty enough. Get them into sports, cook healthy, but dont call them fat. Thats the WORST thing u can do. Putting them on a fad diet or much worse a TV show, could really ruin their self esteem. Im sad for them.

Very nicely written, oviously from the heart! Yes, 'burned in memory' at no matter what age! It takes a lifetime to repair those wounds and I'm not so sure they ever really go away, some we still have to push away and back inside.

I think the point of this thread should be (IMHO) not about what a teen feels when they are a teen or older, those emotions may be completely real, and completely valid, but they are secondary to the issue. When a child is 4 or 5 or 6 or even 10, they don't have the capacity to judge for themself what healthy food is without the guidance of an adult in a position to teach them. Unless their parent or guardian has paid or otherwise contracted someone else to teach their child, then it is their responsibility to make sure that child understands how to eat correctly, and to introduce that child to healthy foods. Allowing the child to learn to "hate" certain foods is no excuse. It's your job as a parent to find the healthy foods for them that they can eat, whether that be through gradual introduction, cajoling, or even through a heavy hand (like almost EVERY parent did before the last decade, I certainly remember mom saying "eat your vegetables or no TV for you tonight." I ate them!), there's a way to do it. Anything else is neglect on one level or another, "giving in" is not an option, EVER.

Once a child is 15 or 16 and can earn their own money, then it comes down to how they were brought up to that point. A child that has been correctly taught the value of food may still make the occasional bad choice, and in some cases, other emotional trauma may still trigger food as a defense mechanism, but we do the best we can as adults. I don't judge teens for being overweight, nor do I judge their parents, not without the full facts. I DO however, privately judge the parents of young children who are obese, that's a flaw, and I shouldn't without the full story, and I recognize this as a bad trait. But then I realize that there are flaws with every human emotion, and sometimes we must just recognize them, thus I know that while I shouldn't judge every parent of an obese child (young child), I know that in 90 to 95% of the cases, my judgement will be correct, and while I feel bad for the 5 or 10 % of parents I mistakenly condemn as "bad", I realize that maybe, if something is done, the other 90% of those children won't grow up with emotional issues that take years to resolve, and sometimes physical problems that can cause them to live unhealthy, unproductive, and shorter lives.

that's my take on the situation.

And yeah, when I see a mom in the grocery store with an obese child and I see pop tarts, a case of regular coke, Mac and Cheese boxes, and Sugar Smacks in their cart, it does make me angry a little inside. I'm sorry, that's just me. I don't like it, and there's nothing I can do to change that.

I do agree that parents are supposed to teach their children from a young age to enjoy vegetables, fruits, etc. rather than candy bars and other junk. That's a parent's responsibility. It totally pisses me off when I see an overweight mom at mcdonalds and her overweight 10 year old kids scarfing down big macs like they haven't ate in a month. That's flat out ridiculous. My brother's wife eats NOTHING but frozen chicken nuggets, frozen pizza, spaghetti-o, pop tarts, and little debbies. She is super skinny but a borderline diabetic. Her kids? They eat all that too. She doesn't even care and I feel bad that nobody ever taught her about eating right. I view it as child abuse.

Now, I'm going to turn the table upside down. I spend much of my childhood with my grandma who was terminally ill with cancer. My parents made mistakes in their lives and were facing the consequences for those decisions so she was all I had. With a background in the medical field, you'd think I ate perfectly healthy. No. Since she was sick beyond belief I got stuck eating tv dinners, chips, little debbies, etc. Why? She loved me. Really, she did. But things like that made it to where I was able to eat at all. At age 6-7, I was fully capable of using a microwave but not so much an oven/stove. So I was chubby kid for sure. Once I got older, it spread out and I was active and slightly overweight and still ate poorly but never out of control. I'm here due to medical related weight gain. Anyways, my point is ... I think its a bit offensive to say EVERY overweight kid is being neglected because that isn't truly always the case.

I totally agree, we as parents are responsible for our children until they are 18, I'm also a foster parent. Last year I had a 6 year old who was 100 lbs, i'm sorry but I feel very strong that the little girls mom should have been brought up on minimum of neglect charge along with her other charges, 100 for a 6 year old that is silly, you cannot but clothes to fit the little girl, And all she needed was portion size meals and exercise and she started slimming down. I feel its the parents fault who let the kids get large, now there are some kids who get large because of medical reasons, and that is understandable. I felt really bad for this this little girl. my guess is now that she is back with mom, she will be 300lbs by the time she is 11 and 500 by the time she is 18. i hope not.

i agree sillygoose1977, parents need to wake up and learn to teach their children right food choices, I was never overweight until i had to take high dose steroids and packed on the weight almost overnight, I was used to being the skinny girl that stayed active, i was 90lbs all through high school, and had 3 children and dropped my pregnancy weight in the hospital, but my steroid weight took me 10years to get off, then finally i got it off. I had the weight off for 2 years then started gaining weight again and didn't know why i was walking our 2 dogs every day and going to the gym almost daily, I went to see my doctor crying. come to find out i had a thyroid problem. so here I am back struggling with my weight. But as for children, they shouldn't need to struggle.

I agree 100%. I had great parents... and a weight problem. I ate good, healthy food, but didn't really exercise enough. Nothing my parents did or didn't do would have changed that fact.

This show is sad, but if you watch, some of these kids are very inspirational. Scotty aside, who in my opinion is just lazy, the rest of them have a chance. The girl that started off at about 515 pounds tried her butt off to walk that mile. If she can do that then she can accomplish anything.

Wait a minute. By definition, a child with a weight problem that isn't brought on by some kind of medical condition IS being neglected (and by child I mean child, not teenager). Now that doesn't mean it's criminal, nor does it make the parents bad people, ignorance, or a difficult life in general can be perfectly valid reasons, but that doesn't justify the behavior. Doctors in the Middle Ages used to "bleed" patients, it wasn't out of malice, it was plain ignorance. they still meant well, but the results are no different. And as I'm sure we all know, in the United States at least, ignorance of a law is not a defense.

whether someone's parents are good people and love the child isn't in question, it's a question of being a responsible adult. If you have the capacity to teach your child something required for good health, and you DON'T teach that child then you are being neglectful. If you give your child good nutrition but they still develop an obesity problem, then it's YOUR JOB to find out what the issue is, and take reasonable steps to remedy the situation, whether that be introducing portion control, exercise, counciling, or some other form of behavioral therapy, it doesn't matter, what matters is making sure you do EVERYTHING for your child that you possibly can. Now I don't know about the rest of the world, but I know that in the US and (I think) Canada, if you can't afford therapy for a child, you can receive free care. And using a single situation cannot be a case, it's to subjective, very few children (or adult children) think they had rotten parents, you're bias, everyone's bias, you must take your own situation out of the picture in order to think objectively about this topic. That's how I feel about it anyway.

Only when all possible (reasonable) avenues are exhausted do I think the parent is free of responsibility. Please note, I recognize the differences between a child with obesity and a Teenager, if the weight was gained during teen years, and the child acknowledges that they overeat or in some other way don't take care of their body, and you do the best you can to find out why to no avail, well that's probably all you can do. Forcing a teen to go into some kind of "fat camp" in what ever form you call it is not, IMHO the best plan of action. Many times you just need to listen to teens, and make sure they know you will always listen and won't judge them.

I think the point of this thread should be (IMHO) not about what a teen feels when they are a teen or older, those emotions may be completely real, and completely valid, but they are secondary to the issue. When a child is 4 or 5 or 6 or even 10, they don't have the capacity to judge for themself what healthy food is without the guidance of an adult in a position to teach them. Unless their parent or guardian has paid or otherwise contracted someone else to teach their child, then it is their responsibility to make sure that child understands how to eat correctly, and to introduce that child to healthy foods. Allowing the child to learn to "hate" certain foods is no excuse. It's your job as a parent to find the healthy foods for them that they can eat, whether that be through gradual introduction, cajoling, or even through a heavy hand (like almost EVERY parent did before the last decade, I certainly remember mom saying "eat your vegetables or no TV for you tonight." I ate them!), there's a way to do it. Anything else is neglect on one level or another, "giving in" is not an option, EVER.

Once a child is 15 or 16 and can earn their own money, then it comes down to how they were brought up to that point. A child that has been correctly taught the value of food may still make the occasional bad choice, and in some cases, other emotional trauma may still trigger food as a defense mechanism, but we do the best we can as adults. I don't judge teens for being overweight, nor do I judge their parents, not without the full facts. I DO however, privately judge the parents of young children who are obese, that's a flaw, and I shouldn't without the full story, and I recognize this as a bad trait. But then I realize that there are flaws with every human emotion, and sometimes we must just recognize them, thus I know that while I shouldn't judge every parent of an obese child (young child), I know that in 90 to 95% of the cases, my judgement will be correct, and while I feel bad for the 5 or 10 % of parents I mistakenly condemn as "bad", I realize that maybe, if something is done, the other 90% of those children won't grow up with emotional issues that take years to resolve, and sometimes physical problems that can cause them to live unhealthy, unproductive, and shorter lives.

that's my take on the situation.

And yeah, when I see a mom in the grocery store with an obese child and I see pop tarts, a case of regular coke, Mac and Cheese boxes, and Sugar Smacks in their cart, it does make me angry a little inside. I'm sorry, that's just me. I don't like it, and there's nothing I can do to change that.

Banks, as usual, said it perfectly.

You know that a child can be taken from their parents if they let them get too fat? So the law agrees that allowing your child to become dangerously obese IS abuse.

The children in my classroom are treated with respect and dignity. They are happy and healthy kids who have an hour of PE every day. Even if there were overweight kids in my class, speaking to them about that (in any manner) would be out of line. It is my job to teach them to read, write, calculate math problem, understand history and science. All the other stuff, such as religion, politics, health, morality, finances....those are the PARENT"S job. IMHO as always.....................

that's just it...they are held responsible. All the debate about whether it is abuse or not is like debating gravity. You can argue all you like, but it's still true. If CPS discovers that a child has become dangerously obese in a parent's care, they can (and they have) taken that child away and given them to the other parent, or even foster care.

Just my 2 cents... I wasn't taught how to eat right as a kid beacuse it didn't ''matter." I could eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Literally 3 and 4 servings at a meal and 5 or 6 snacks thru the day - no matter what I ate I didn't gain weight. I was TINY growing up and keeping me full was my parents main focus, teaching me portion control wasn't an issue. As a result, when I grew up & my metabolism slowed, I packed on a ton of weight. So, in my case, my weight gain as a teen was in no way their fault.

I disagree. Because your parents didn't teach it, you grew up without the knowledge of how to eat correctly, a direct result of not knowing was a reason why you gained weight.

Ask yourself this, if your parents DID teach you how to eat correctly when younger, and assuming you gained the knowledge, do you still think you would have become overweight later? Maybe, or maybe not, that's tough to know for sure as maybe there were outside factors that we (and maybe even you) were unaware of, but not having that information, you were in a less desirable position because you didn't even know what you were doing wrong, at best you probably had a vague idea that you weren't eating right, but that's not the same as understanding nutrition.

Make no mistake, I'm not relieving someone of their own responsibility to learn about nutrition, but as we obviously can see as a country, our nutrition is atrocious, and that comes from the parents first. Yes, big food puts out a glut of "fast food" and nasty stuff, but we, the consumers buy it, and we, the parents, give it to our children when there are other options available.

this all hits tooc lose to home for me. I am worried sick about my step daughter. She is 7 years old and already weighs 115 pounds. The kids at school make fun of her and call her names. I feel so bad for her. We get her 2 weekends a month and thats just not enough time to teach her to make right choices when shes not here. when shes with us, we all are active....walking, hiking, swimming.....etc. She eats good here.....meat, startch and lots of veggies for dinner. But when she goes home it all falls apart! all she does is either sit in her room or in front of the television. She told me last weekend that her mom packed her a peanut butter sandwich for her lunch....ok, so thats not bad at all....all kids eat that! but the problem was the honey bun, pack of cookies and sugery snack that was packed with it! And of course seh was sllowed to buy 3 choco milks at school to go with it! And now her mom wonders why she so overweight. She dropped her off one morning over the summer and told me she had a hotdog and 2 donuts for breakfast! What the world is this woman thinking?

this all hits tooc lose to home for me. I am worried sick about my step daughter. She is 7 years old and already weighs 115 pounds. The kids at school make fun of her and call her names. I feel so bad for her. We get her 2 weekends a month and thats just not enough time to teach her to make right choices when shes not here. when shes with us, we all are active....walking, hiking, swimming.....etc. She eats good here.....meat, startch and lots of veggies for dinner. But when she goes home it all falls apart! all she does is either sit in her room or in front of the television. She told me last weekend that her mom packed her a peanut butter sandwich for her lunch....ok, so thats not bad at all....all kids eat that! but the problem was the honey bun, pack of cookies and sugery snack that was packed with it! And of course seh was sllowed to buy 3 choco milks at school to go with it! And now her mom wonders why she so overweight. She dropped her off one morning over the summer and told me she had a hotdog and 2 donuts for breakfast! What the world is this woman thinking?

That's a tough situation. Are you on friendly terms with her mother? Would it be a nightmare to express concern (gently I would imagine). You do the best you can, maybe, if you explain it well enough, she'll start asking her mom for better foods. That's all you can do, I don't know that it's to the point where you could claim foul to any authorities, but it's a tough situation for you.

I disagree. Because your parents didn't teach it, you grew up without the knowledge of how to eat correctly, a direct result of not knowing was a reason why you gained weight.

Ask yourself this, if your parents DID teach you how to eat correctly when younger, and assuming you gained the knowledge, do you still think you would have become overweight later? Maybe, or maybe not, that's tough to know for sure as maybe there were outside factors that we (and maybe even you) were unaware of, but not having that information, you were in a less desirable position because you didn't even know what you were doing wrong, at best you probably had a vague idea that you weren't eating right, but that's not the same as understanding nutrition.

Make no mistake, I'm not relieving someone of their own responsibility to learn about nutrition, but as we obviously can see as a country, our nutrition is atrocious, and that comes from the parents first. Yes, big food puts out a glut of "fast food" and nasty stuff, but we, the consumers buy it, and we, the parents, give it to our children when there are other options available.

What I was eating was healthy, mine was directly related to portion control. I wasn't eating fast food & pop 24/7. I'm just saying in my case, teaching me to eat the correct portions would have left me a starved child, literally. Now, had they taken me to fast food places several times a day, and let me drink juice/chocolate milk/pop & eat chips & cookies for snacks then yes, I'd agree it could have been prevented. They probably should have stepped in once I did become a teen & started to gain weight, that I can hold them accountable for, but when I was a child? I just don't see it.

My three kids are the same way, they are all underweight, nothing medically 'wrong' with them. The only thing I can really see doing different than my parents is keeping on top of the issue when they do become teens. *shrug*

And no, you're not alone, we rarely got flavored milk...I much prefer plain, white milk.

That's the other thing, what's with all the flavored milk these days? Am I the only one who remembers my mom ALLOWING me to mix in chocolate syrup once or twice a week as a treat? When did chocolate or strawberry milk become acceptable as a lunch food in our public schools? What A$$H0le made that ok? I mean, even in the 70's when I was growing up, we knew that you shouldn't drink chocolate milk every day.

Totally agree! When I was in school we only had chocolate milk on fridays. And when my mom let me have hersheys in milk I called it dessert. The one good thing I will say is that now water is also an option with school lunches.