Don't Let Your Kids Get Too Fat, Unless You Want Them Taken Away
In America, land of the pizza-vegetable and the 24-hour chicken meal, kids who get "too obese" can now be taken from their homes and placed with foster families who receive personal training assistance not made available to their own parents. This is happening right now!
Last month, Cuyahoga County, Ohio case workers decided that the mom of an eight-year-old, 200-pound boy wasn't doing enough to help him slim down and took the boy away from her before she gave him diabetes and hypertension. The boy's inability to lose weight—all the fault of his mom, an elementary school teacher—constituted "medical neglect." How can the county people be so sure that the boy doesn't suffer from hypothyroidism? What about all the junky foods the boy kept receiving from other kids he knew? Let's ignore those factors and continue assigning blame to the mom, who now gets to see her son only two hours per week.
Since being placed with the foster family, the boy has lost a few pounds. Mission accomplished, right? Well:
[N]ow lawyers for the mother say they've been told that the foster mother who has the child in a neighboring suburb is having trouble keeping up with all of his appointments.
There was even a discussion about getting the foster mother additional help or moving the child again, this time to a foster home with a personal trainer, Amata said.
Yes, just keep moving the boy around until he's thinner. All the walking from foster home to foster home should melt off all those extra pounds.
Back in July, the Los Angeles Times reported on the issue of placing obese children in foster care and predicted that "[i]t's not going to happen soon." Guess they were wrong.
