I was reading an article that I found interesting from the UK, where parents were charged with the manslaughter of her child due to letting her be too obese. The girl was 16 years of age and suffered from spina bifida, making mobility difficult. However, this is something that I think is going to become more prevalent in the future, where failure by parents to meet adequate dietary needs will be punishable.
If a parent doesn't provide enough food and a child is malnourished and starving, it is already punishable, but I haven't heard of the opposite end of the spectrum, where the outcomes of too much and the wrong foods are being punished, even though this is also malnourishment - bad nutrition. And, while the child might not be starving, the impacts on a child's life from obesity and the associated problems that arise with it, can be severe and profound.
Nutrition affects everything we do, including the way we think and because it impacts on our hormonal system too, it also does a lot to the way we feel. And often, the types of foods that create obesity, are going to cause the emotional rollercoaster to be more volatile, with mood swings, depression common, as well as inability to concentrate and retain information. These factors affect other behaviors and relationships we have too, which can have profound impacts on the experience of our life and, the impacts we make on others, which can create a cyclical loop that can have a lot of negative consequences, as it reinforces some of our poorer behaviors, often driving us to compulsive behaviors, like overeating.
While I am interested in this, a lot of people try to hijack the conversation as if it is about body shaming, but that is not the argument at all - it is about general health now and the impact it makes on our future experiences, including our future happiness. In a world where we blame many of our adult issues on our parents, it seems only natural that this will extend into how our parents attended to our health, including the way they have fed us.
As a parent myself, I have to come to terms that I am going to blamed for a lot of things, whether it was within my control or not, but I also have to accept that I am accountable for my child and while not all health outcomes are under my control, a lot of the dietary factors are. What I feed my daughter and how I encourage her eating habits are things I need to consider, and if I neglect to learn and handle them well, I am neglecting her. At some point, overfeeding and poor nutritional content becomes child abuse, in the same way not feeding a child is abusive.
It is hard to see emaciated children abused by their parents, and I don't understand why there isn't a similar reaction to overweight children who are also abused by their parents. It seems like a double-standard, because while the parents are held accountable for child abuse on one end of the extreme, they are not accountable on the other, although going on the case of the 16 year old mentioned, it seems that the tide is slowly turning.
But, with the majority of people overweight or obese in this world, I am not sure what will actually come of it, as the pressure seems to continually be heading in the other direction. People are demanding "normal representation" not healthy representation in things like magazines, with normal being an average of populations that have 70% overweight and 40% obese.
However, knowing what kinds of impacts obesity has on the body, mind and experience of the individuals, and knowing what kinds of issues it has on children, including their social experience, it seems that something has to change. Rather than continually moving the goal posts of what is considered normal, there needs to be a definition of what is healthy that is wide enough to allow for variation, but narrow enough that there is a line that can be drawn on both sides of what is abusive behavior.
Now, I am not a big fan of government intervention, but this is also a social cultural issue, which complicates things further, as there are going to always be many opinions on what is considered healthy or happy. Yet, when it comes to parents who are assumed to want the best for their own children, the weight conversation seems to get avoided on the upside of the scale. Anyone who does bring up the conversation is shouted down and punished for body-shaming or not factoring in "unique" attributes of individuals, or their personalities.
I can only go on my own experience, but I have been physically healthy, extremely skinny with illness and somewhat overweight. Being skinny was horrible, and being somewhat overweight is quite uncomfortable, and I can't imagine what it would actually feel like to be obese, but I can't imagine it would be "better". If we could magically click our fingers and be our personal perfect weight, I wonder what that would actually look like. I would imagine that based on my discomfort now, I would likely end up being about 10 kilos lighter and perhaps for some people, they would be a little heavier. But, out of 7 billion people, what percentage would be obese?
If looking at "general wellbeing" as the metric and having that spread across physical, psychological and emotional sectors, our weight is only a piece of the equation. But pretending that it isn't an important piece of the equation is folly, because the processes that go into developing obesity have implications on all three of those areas, in the short, mid and long term view of each. It is hard to know what is driving what in terms of the three, but it is clear that there is a correlation between the three, where when one of the sectors is out of sync, it impacts on the others.
Personally, the best I have ever felt across the three has been when my physical condition has been good, because when I feel physically well, I am more open, active and willing to engage with the world around me. I wish I felt physically healthy all of the time, because it really does make me a better person, which is why I don't understand how parents would encourage and even impose, unhealthy habits on their children, and apparently, still believe they have their best interest at heart. But obviously, I am quite naïve in this area at least and I am sure that someone will set me straight as to why encouraging children to be obese is a good thing for the child.
But, the conversation does open up a lot of questions in many areas of parenting and perhaps starts to explore the question of what is good parenting and what is bad, and where is the line where it becomes abusive. All the parents I know want to be good parents and most seem to believe that they are, but are they really considering the wellbeing of the child, or is "good parenting" doing what is socially acceptable, regardless of the outcomes for the children?
If you saw a child, with bruises all over their body and face - would you assume abuse? If they were very thin - would you assume abuse? Why is it not the same if the child is obese?
I don't know what a good parent is, but the outcomes of the child has to be considered a factor.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]