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Is letting your chlid get fat abuse?

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Is it rational for social services to consider parents letting their children get obese physical abuse? This is one of those issues that I'm not sure about. It almost seems reasonable for them to take a child away in this case because they will suffer later in life from their choices when they were nonrational beings. But then again, some children are rational enough to know they shouldn't eat junk food and with the same logic they could take a child away from their family for non-objective reasons. The only reason I question it is because feeding a child bad food to the point of obesity in actuality causes more physical harm than beating.

Edited by Dreamspirit
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This sidesteps the question but still needs to be said.

1. Unlike real abuse, which is extraordinarily rare, fat is hard to define even approximately. The same goes for skinny. Look what CPS – Child Protective Services, or whatever it’s called – did to one vegetarian couple. When CPS took their children away from them they tried to get their children back by force. The eventual trial, with Edgar Steele as defense lawyer, was featured on TV (I don’t watch such things and only read about it). The mother, Ruth Christine, spent 7 years in prison, the father will have served 12 when released in 2013.

(By the way, the defense lawyer was a free speech advocate who once defended the founder of Aryan Nations, losing. Recently he was charged and convicted of attempting to murder his wife and mother-in-law, which is as authentic as the Christine’s child abuse. The fact that some of his views are disagreeable, to say the least, is irrelevant here.)

2. CPS has a long history of itself abusing children. The late Nancy Schaefer spoke and wrote about this:

The Corrupt Business of Child Protective Services

Look what they did to Kelly Michaels and children she was alleged to have abused, one of several cases described in No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times

by Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal. I think we’d be better off without CPS, assault and battery was illegal without it. At least don’t add another quiver to their bow.

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Ehhhh

This is a particularly interesting issue, which sort of "touches home" for my brothers and I. For the majority of our childhood we were over weight. Why? Well I am 5 years older than one of my brothers and he is a year older than the other. It is really boring when your parents live no where near your friends. We don't live like most people in the subdivision where I can just walk to my friends house.. My parents are horrible parents.. Oh wait, I mean lazy.. er they just suck. Ok no nice way to phrase this really.

They would constantly complain, gripe and whine about us not going outside and 'playing' and they always blamed the computer, the playstation, and anything else they could. In fact they even locked us out the house some days in hopes we would decide to "play" together. What did we do? sat idle like drones disconnected from the hive. Why? Because, we didn't have any friends. We couldn't just go hang out with friends anytime we wanted and do stuff outside.. We had to have our parents drive us.

Guess how often our parents wanted to drive us anywhere? never. If it was a weekday they would say "oh you have school tomorrow you should just wait till the weekend to go hang out with that friend!".

I mean, my brothers and I were never interested in the outdoors to begin with. We loved playing games, reading articles online ect. If we had friends it may not have made any difference but, I promise you. When it comes to you trying to occupy yourself outside.. It is a lot more boring than if you have actual friends to do it with. You can't play football by yourself.. Baseball, or any sport really. And if you don't get to practice.. you suck compared to the other kids and are less likely to do it by comparison.

Is it my parents fault for living out in the middle of no where?

Sure.

Are they hypocrites for never really examining the situation and never really engaging us in anyway that involved exercise.

Absolutely.

Do I think they should be held accountable for the fact we were over weight?

Eh... probably not. If you start nit picking the ways my parents were crappy, it is the least of their faults.

If you start examining every single parent out there for faults, you would end up realizing very few people are fit to be parents.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yeah, I think it's more like really seriously obese children that they would take away from their parents, not just overweight children, but yeah, I wasn't suggesting they should nitpick parents for stuff like that. When it all comes down to it, nearly 90% of parents abuse their kids in some way, not that they shouldn't be held accountable, but you can't involve government in stuff like that unless it is real physical abuse. I was just wondering if someone should be held accountable if they are so slobby that they feed their kids bad food and it hurts their health. It's almost like if someone let their kid run into traffic and say they just didn't see them. I was a little tubby when I was young, certainly not overweight, but I was given a normal diet, I think it's not something to focus on, unless it is just ridiculous and really hurting their health. I think it is very dangerous to try to make parents think their kids should be slim though because that just encourages anorexia.

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  • 5 years later...
On 10/9/2011 at 4:27 PM, Dreamspirit said:

Is it rational for social services to consider parents letting their children get obese physical abuse? This is one of those issues that I'm not sure about. It almost seems reasonable for them to take a child away in this case because they will suffer later in life from their choices when they were non rational beings. But then again, some children are rational enough to know they shouldn't eat junk food and with the same logic they could take a child away from their family for non-objective reasons. The only reason I question it is because feeding a child bad food to the point of obesity in actuality causes more physical harm than beating.

As Tanaka said before, it's not abuse, its being a negligent parent. Yes, it's bad for children to eat junk food when they are not aware of the damage it will do to them when they grow up, then again there are lots of ads nowadays telling parents and children to eat healthy. These ads usually explain the servings that a plate should have, that they should eat fruits and vegetables, and also do exercise. Now here's the fun part, it's not only the parents' responsibility but also the school and the child. Schools should teach children to take care of themselves at a young age, and also give nutritious servings in school cafeteria. Now many schools do this but not all, that is why I mention it. On the other hand if the child doesn't want to eat healthy or do exercise, the best one can do is convince them, if it does not work then it is on the child, but only if the child is conscious of the dangers of being unhealthy.

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