Ohio puts child in foster care for being overweight.

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I think I'd prefer "tough love" over "cruel".
Something really cruel would be to walk away and leave the mother free to unwittingly kill her child with love and food.

If it had gone unchecked just a little further and the child had ended up hospitalized because of this suffocation (which is basically what it is), then there would likely still be the same enforced isolation from the primary cause of the problem and the same concentrated effort on recovering his health.
The mother is a significant part of the problem the child is experiencing as a result of her own problems; they will need addressing too before there can be any hope for the child's continued health.
On the one side is a person I'd say is incapable of pulling back from giving, and on the other is a person who has learned that that form of mothering is the norm. It isn't, and those patterns need to be unlearned. I think there's much more to this than simply providing far too much food and allowing more contact is essentially agreeing to the status quo and letting it continue.
The mother clearly loves her child (almost literally) to death - but how would she feel, being allowed to see him more often yet being prevented from feeding him?

They may as well but the whole of America in foster care then. Although the foster homes probably feed them deep fried lard anyway.

In all seriousness I think it's just going too far, the social services should closely monitor thier progress but NOT take the child away, it's just wrong.

*shrug*
A child would be removed in a heartbeat if it was being starved or beaten and everyone would applaud.
I just see this as the same thing. It's child abuse.


(Heh - deep fried lard. Slimmer's diet! )

Really? I just see an over indulgent mother who needs a lot of help with her parenting skills. With starvation or violence against a child, you have a total disregard for the child's welfare, if not out and out hatred. Here in this case, I don't see that.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Hmm yeah, but isn't someone over-feeding their child to the point of endangering his life showing a total disregard for his welfare?
Not a calculated, nasty, directed disregard for his welfare in the same sense as beating or deliberately withholding food - but his welfare is still being disregarded and the child is in danger as a result.
Over at least a year of monitoring and help with parenting skills - yet he's still in danger?
Should they maybe pile in more helpers and give it another couple of years and hope the mother will suddenly understand, before the child dies?
Nah. He's in trouble now.

It makes me wonder what the nature of this monitoring and helping actually was. If people actually came into the home and monitored what he ate and kept track of it to see what he was actually eating, that would be very informative and helpful and would target actual problems. If they came by to visit every couple months to see if he was still fat, that's not helpful. The assumption is that this woman is stuffing him at every turn with junk food, but did anyone actually test that assumption? Or did they just assume it was the only possible way for him to get fat? I guess they'll find out after he's been in foster care for awhile.

I say this because I was reading the comment sections in some googled articles about this (it piqued my interest). In some of these comments, people talked about their own childhood obesity and how they managed to maintain it despite parental attempts to thin them down. Some commentors became so enraged as obese children put on diets by their parents that they managed to keep gaining by sneaky means. They stole food from around their own home and anywhere outside the home they could get it. I have no idea if that's going on here, but it was a childhood story of some commentors. If it is that, can a foster parent stop it? The commentors felt childhood rage at being put on diets by their parents. What sort of emotional eating effects will there be now that he has literally been taken out of his home?

I think a better option would have been to have a nutritionist actually in his home for several days (or reporting to his home for several days of 8 hour shifts) to work both with him and his mom and actually tally what he ate. Maybe they did that, but I doubt it. Another option would have been to enroll him in a summer fat camp, sleepaway, and have the nutritionist work with his mom while he was there. Expensive, yes, but foster families cost money too. And it would have been less disruptive. A summer fat camp is away from parental influence for a set time but it is not loss of custody and doesn't represent such scary unpheaval in a child's life.

I actually think Janissy has very good points on this matter.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

This child is 8 years old and weighs 218lbs. My son is almost 10, and weighs less than 70lbs. I am an adult woman, and the heaviest I've been was 154lbs, two days before my son was born.

Because of his weight this child relies on a machine to ensure that he lives through the night!

This is obviously a long term and complex issue with no easy solutions, but I do agree that for a parent to let a child get so extremely heavy, life-threateningly so, is abuse and neglect of his physical and emotional needs and welfare.

All good points, Janissy.

Yes, quite - what were they doing for all that time?

There are plenty of ways this could have been so much better managed but it seemed to just carry on rolling along and became an emergency issue, and I have to wonder if the removal wasn't just the end result of an ineffective rescue plan leaving no other option.

I agree that the nutritionist at home plus the summer fat camp would have been a much better plan.
The whole issue has many more levels to it than short newspaper articles tend to report and I suspect they were going for a more sensationalist "child snatched from mother" approach.

Someone needs to lay off the Mickey D's...

Did the year of "monitoring" include any medical testing? This kid could have thyroid issues or some kind of hormone imbalance. Maybe he has diabetes. Who knows.
I'm guessing that CPS just showed up a few times and checked some boxes on a form. That's the "monitoring". They watched him be fat for a while.

Strawman, and an absurd one at that.

They'll take away a kid if its parents are starving it, gross overfeeding is just the opposite end of the spectrum.