Fat Boy May Be Placed In Care

I posted on my site about this, too. I think the government is way out of line. There must be other ways to deal with this besides taking an 8-year-old from his family. I've also read conflicting reports about Connor's current weight. Some say he's 218 pounds now. Others say he used to be 218 at his heaviest, but he's lost about 20 pounds in the last 2 months. They even did a TV documentary on this boy. Granted, something needs to be done. But there are lots of overweight kids. Why is this one boy such a target? As I said on my site, instead of yanking the boy from his home, why don't they yank the fridge?

Diet-Blog said:
8 year old Connor McCreaddie weighs around 15+ stone (over 210lbs).[...]

Holy damm*t Christmas!!

Although I agree that this is an extreme case of childhood obesity, I think this poor child has become the victim of the media. I have been involved in cases where children were experiencing much more extreme neglect and were not taken out of their parents' care. This is not to say that this practice is acceptable, but more to echo the comment that it should be *very* last resort to remove a child from the home and the mother should be given intervention around parenting and nutrition long before removing this poor boy. Although I agree that the mother should have control over what the boy eats, he would not have gotten this way if she had the knowledge and skills to feed and parent him properly.

Also, this opens up a very slippery slope of what constitutes child protection. Do we remove any child who is being fed fast food more than a certain number of sanctioned times per week?

Debbie said:
, instead of yanking the boy from his home, why don't they yank the fridge?[...]

Ryan said:
Holy damm*t Christmas!![...]

Debbie said:
I've also read conflicting reports about Connor's current weight.[...]

Anyway - he has been permitted to stay with his mother -- but it raises some ugly questions.

I think the fact that he gets to control his eating shows more serious problems with that mother's parenting than just his weight. She would probably also say "He doesn't do his homework, but if I forced him to, he'd just be complaining all night" or later, "If we don't give him money for drugs, he'd be going at us all night asking for it, so we just give it to him earlier in the day". It is the fact that she doesn't think she can say no to her 8-year-old that shocks me there, not the fact the child is overweight.

I can understand that this boys weight is extreme but I think that sometimes the government can be pretty daft when making it's decisions. When my daughter was two they told me that I was making her too fat. Now she has a condition called SOD, this means that she is blind in one eye, cannot prouduce hormones and is autistic- that is the most downplayed exp about her condition. Regardless at two she was not walking yet so she wasn't burning the calories that we were giving her. Now in rememdy of this the doctors demanded that we put her on a very restrictive diet which included no fat and about half of the calories that you would give to a toddler at this point she weighed 45 lbs. Now in my opinion there was nothing wrong with her weight, she was a healty little girl. But we were threatened that if we did not make the change that they would remove her and cite negelect. While lo and behold she does start walking and the weight that they were concerned with starts to drop. So they keep telling us that the diet is making the change and to keep her on it. While by the time that she turns three and a half we are taking her in to the hospital and voicing our concerns that she has lost too much weight. At this point she was down to 27 pounds. I don't care where you got your medical degree you can not tell me that that is a healthy weight for a child! So I start to disregard what they are saying and we have to take her in again on an unrelated issue. And what do you know a nurse puts in a phone call to Childrens services and accuses us of starvation. So the worker comes out, looks at our home, our other healthy, normal child and then sits me down. At this point I am going out of my mind since we have fought and told the professionals that she needed to come off the diet that they perscriped. So regardless this woman sits me down and I show her all the notes from previous doctor visits that prove that the request for weightloss was by a doctor. While she must have been told different because she suddenly gets very angry. So we ask her what she plans to do and she tells us not to worry that there is no way that they would remove a child that came from such a loving home. That day she goes in and talks to all of my daughters doctors with the evidence in hand. That very day we were told to stop the diet and up her caloric intake(something we were secretly doing anyways) Did we get an apology? no Did it prove to me that at times interference from the state can do a child more harm than good? Completely. Today we have raised my daughters weight to 35 lbs. She still has a long way to go but she is getting there. My point is that when the state steps in you can wind up with more harm then good. Unless you are in the shoes of this family then you can not possibly know what they go through. Be careful how you judge a situation when you are playing the peeping tom.

This reminded me of a very young girl I saw the other day. 3 feet tall, and her waist was at least as large around as mine, if not more so... (And I'm an overweight 5'4 female)
Her father brought her a full plate of fried chicken and nacho cheese sauce, to go with her adult-sized glass of soda.

Neglect is neglect. If you are behaving in a way that compromises your child's health, you are not behaving as a fit parent.
We've given the government authority to take away children in cases of neglect-- you can't protest now just because it hits a little closer to home.

That's just my opinion...

I really have to wonder if there's some endocrine or neurologic problem going on. Children don't develop that extreme sort of obesity just because of poor parenting and junk food. I imagine that his mother and his dietician would be able to make better progress with him if any underlying disease or psychiatric condition is treated.

Ryan.
Don't cuss.

jj said:
I really have to wonder if there's some endocrine or neurologic problem going on. Children don't develop that extreme sort of obesity just because of poor parenting and junk food. I imagine that his mother and his dietician would be able to make better progress with him if any underlying disease or psychiatric condition is treated.[...]

JJ, the mother says right there:

He has double, treble what a normal boy (of his age) would have, but if I didn't give him enough at teatime then he would just go on at us all night for snacks and stuff.

She is allowing an 8-year-old to choose how much and what he gets to eat. I don't think there is necessarily an underlying disorder there. Children that young are not equipped to know what is good for them. If you give any (non-obese) 8-year-old a pound of his/her favorite food, odds are he/she will eat it all in one sitting and then get sick later. It is up to the parents to regulate diet.

I find it so sad how this 8 year old boy is seen all over the media. Can you imagin how he feels when he sees himself on television or newspapers as an obese child. His self-esteem must be so low.Isn't it enough that people on the street, at school, and the people around him all look at him strangely. How is this helping a child? I think we are worsening the situation.

Obviously this child needs help and it's definately the environment that he lives in the major problem. The mother needs to get professional help with her parenting skills and the child should be visitng doctors and dieticians and be put on a diet. I can understand why the government wants to take away this child from the environment he is living in. I think this child is being neglected by his mother and I believe that the government is just tring to save a innocent child's life.