Genetics is Not Child Abuse

I was blissfully away at the beach yesterday when the news broke about whether parents should lose custody of obese children.  Most of what needs to be said has already.

When I read things like this I can't even describe the anger I feel.  Personally, I feel scared because I am a young woman (24 in less than a week!) who is planning on having children in the next 3-4 years.  Honestly, I'm not sure I am willing to put up with this kind of stuff.  From children's lunch habits being monitored in school, to forcing them to eat school lunches so I can't give them what I want (or more importantly what they want) to threatening to take them away if they are not the "right" size.  I want to teach my kids to have a healthy relationship with food and a positive attitude towards moving their bodies, and it seems like the ENTIRE WORLD wants something else for me.  A part of me just wants to give up now and not have children at all.

Professionally, I feel that this is an incredible waste of resources.  The foster system in this country is incredibly crowded.  There are thousands of children being bumped from home to home for all kinds of legitimate reasons.  To take fat kids, who suffer enough in this crazy society to begin with, and put them in this system that so often fails is criminal.  Honestly, the parents who force their kids on diets should be the ones deemed child abusers, but nobody sees Michelle Obama's children being taken away from her do they?

Instead of all this finger-pointing, maybe we should focus on healthcare for everyone and education in this country that isn't fat-phobic and disordered-eating-inducing.  Maybe we should teach parents to teach their children to eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full and eat what their body wants.  And maybe we should stop looking at physical characteristics as death sentences.  This obsession over fat children has to end, because the people who suffer the most, of course, are the children themselves.

Please check out Lesley at Two Whole Cakes and April at I AM in Shape. Round is a shape. for their takes on this nightmarish idea.