(no subject)
Jan. 28th, 2010 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivka A couple in Bellevue, WA have been criminally charged for starving their baby so she wouldn't get fat.
The starvation appears to have begun before birth; the mother was induced at 38 weeks because of poor fetal growth, and the baby was only 5 1/4 pounds at birth. Two months later, having gained only a pound, the baby was removed from the parents' custody and placed into foster care - where she gained six pounds in two months. The mother's response was to complain that the baby had gotten fat. Shortly thereafter, the foster mother thought the baby's bottle smelled funny after a visit with the mother. Its contents were analyzed and found to contain a laxative.
The mother complained that she wanted her children's weight to stay below the 50th percentile because the father (6' and 185lbs) "has a weight problem." When the father saw his baby at a normal weight, he complained that the child had gained so much weight she wouldn't learn to walk.
Clearly there are massive mental health problems involved here. The mother was diagnosed with postpartum depression with psychotic features shortly after the birth, and she reported that she stopped taking her medication after only a few days because of side effects. The Seattle Times reports that at 5'5" she only weighs 90 pounds. So, you know, she's probably anorexic herself. I hope the parents get help. I hope their kids are not returned to them.
I don't want to minimize the individual pathology involved here... but I have to say that I do also blame the enormous social hysteria about "childhood obesity," and the extent to which American cultural ideas about food and health are excessively focused on dieting. It probably does take a mental disorder to actually starve your baby. But I believe that unhealthy, restrictive, and dieting-influenced views about feeding babies and children are widespread and dangerous. People inclined to make their children's food intake conform to the standards of adult dieters will find plenty of encouragement out there, and not many cautions.
My experience of this comes from having had an underweight kid. Alex didn't gain any weight from 9 to 15 months, and I spent a lot of time surfing parenting advice websites and forums looking for advice about how to foster weight gain. I did come up with some excellent advice about increasing the nutritional density of the foods I offered. I also came upon the same few things again and again, in discussion threads related to toddlers who were underweight or slipping on the growth charts:
I am ashamed to say that I eventually figured out that I fell into the trap of that third mindset myself. I fed Alex plenty of foods which were each healthy individually, but overall her diet was lacking in fat and she tended to fill her stomach up with foods that were low-calorie. I'd give her a rice cake to nibble on, for example, while I was fixing her lunch. I thought her diet was healthy... and if it had been my diet, it would have been. Young children have different dietary needs. They need quite a bit of fat. They need energy-dense foods. And they need to gain weight on a steady curve, even if you do suspect that the kids who made up the growth-chart sample ate Cheetos.
A few times, in these discussions, the diet-focused mindset was so intense that people seemed literally unable to understand that they were being asked about weight gain, even when it had been well-explained by the original poster. Instead, they replied with helpful suggestions for weight loss.
I remember two examples specifically. In one case, a woman whose child had special needs and had been clinically diagnosed as having "failure to thrive" described how she had finally figured out that she could get him to eat enough food to keep him out of the hospital if she sat him in his highchair in front of Sesame Street. The first reply: "Letting kids eat in front of the TV is bad because 'automatic eating' can lead to obesity." In the other case, a mother posted asking for recommendations for her underweight preschooler. The first response: "It's my understanding that the most important thing is to teach your child to avoid 'emotional eating.'"
The diet culture seeps in even when people are railing against eating disorders. Check out this blog post from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The guy goes on at length about what a horrible, horrible mother this woman is who starved her baby. Then he comes out with this:
So: trying to make your kids have "fashion-model figures" is not a problem. Constantly monitoring every bite they take for eighteen or nineteen years is not a problem. Teaching them to vilify whole food groups is not a problem. The only problem, apparently, is thinking that you can "short-cut the process" and make your kids be skinny without unceasing effort. (And he has no idea where these parents got their crazy ideas about food.)
So yeah, I think the parents of this poor baby have serious psychiatric problems. But I also think that the culture they live in gives far too much validation to the idea that thinness = health and health = thinness, and that diet-monitoring can never begin too early. So in addition to heaping blame on the parents, I have plenty of blame left over for every hand-wringing news article hyping the scourge of "childhood obesity" and every parental-advice source that stresses purity of diet.
I read the news articles I linked to above while Colin was eating his lunch. I spread the butter on his whole-wheat toast extra thick and gave him an extra half-slice of cheese.
The starvation appears to have begun before birth; the mother was induced at 38 weeks because of poor fetal growth, and the baby was only 5 1/4 pounds at birth. Two months later, having gained only a pound, the baby was removed from the parents' custody and placed into foster care - where she gained six pounds in two months. The mother's response was to complain that the baby had gotten fat. Shortly thereafter, the foster mother thought the baby's bottle smelled funny after a visit with the mother. Its contents were analyzed and found to contain a laxative.
The mother complained that she wanted her children's weight to stay below the 50th percentile because the father (6' and 185lbs) "has a weight problem." When the father saw his baby at a normal weight, he complained that the child had gained so much weight she wouldn't learn to walk.
Clearly there are massive mental health problems involved here. The mother was diagnosed with postpartum depression with psychotic features shortly after the birth, and she reported that she stopped taking her medication after only a few days because of side effects. The Seattle Times reports that at 5'5" she only weighs 90 pounds. So, you know, she's probably anorexic herself. I hope the parents get help. I hope their kids are not returned to them.
I don't want to minimize the individual pathology involved here... but I have to say that I do also blame the enormous social hysteria about "childhood obesity," and the extent to which American cultural ideas about food and health are excessively focused on dieting. It probably does take a mental disorder to actually starve your baby. But I believe that unhealthy, restrictive, and dieting-influenced views about feeding babies and children are widespread and dangerous. People inclined to make their children's food intake conform to the standards of adult dieters will find plenty of encouragement out there, and not many cautions.
My experience of this comes from having had an underweight kid. Alex didn't gain any weight from 9 to 15 months, and I spent a lot of time surfing parenting advice websites and forums looking for advice about how to foster weight gain. I did come up with some excellent advice about increasing the nutritional density of the foods I offered. I also came upon the same few things again and again, in discussion threads related to toddlers who were underweight or slipping on the growth charts:
- "With childhood obesity such a huge problem, why is a doctor worried about one of the skinny kids?"
- "You know, the growth charts are based on kids who eat a standard American diet with lots of junk food."
- "She only eats whole grains, veggies, and fruits - that's a great, healthy diet for a toddler!"
I am ashamed to say that I eventually figured out that I fell into the trap of that third mindset myself. I fed Alex plenty of foods which were each healthy individually, but overall her diet was lacking in fat and she tended to fill her stomach up with foods that were low-calorie. I'd give her a rice cake to nibble on, for example, while I was fixing her lunch. I thought her diet was healthy... and if it had been my diet, it would have been. Young children have different dietary needs. They need quite a bit of fat. They need energy-dense foods. And they need to gain weight on a steady curve, even if you do suspect that the kids who made up the growth-chart sample ate Cheetos.
A few times, in these discussions, the diet-focused mindset was so intense that people seemed literally unable to understand that they were being asked about weight gain, even when it had been well-explained by the original poster. Instead, they replied with helpful suggestions for weight loss.
I remember two examples specifically. In one case, a woman whose child had special needs and had been clinically diagnosed as having "failure to thrive" described how she had finally figured out that she could get him to eat enough food to keep him out of the hospital if she sat him in his highchair in front of Sesame Street. The first reply: "Letting kids eat in front of the TV is bad because 'automatic eating' can lead to obesity." In the other case, a mother posted asking for recommendations for her underweight preschooler. The first response: "It's my understanding that the most important thing is to teach your child to avoid 'emotional eating.'"
The diet culture seeps in even when people are railing against eating disorders. Check out this blog post from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The guy goes on at length about what a horrible, horrible mother this woman is who starved her baby. Then he comes out with this:
Ultimately, if you really want to produce healthy children with fashion-model figures, you have to do some real parenting; adjusting your child's eating habits away from the starch/sugar/fat quicksand of modern culture and teaching about the virtues of a GREAT diet. It's work. It's eighteen, nineteen years of constant supervision and good examples and the Labbertons tried to short-cut the process, which they not only shouldn't do, they simply can't do - not without dire consequences to their children.
So: trying to make your kids have "fashion-model figures" is not a problem. Constantly monitoring every bite they take for eighteen or nineteen years is not a problem. Teaching them to vilify whole food groups is not a problem. The only problem, apparently, is thinking that you can "short-cut the process" and make your kids be skinny without unceasing effort. (And he has no idea where these parents got their crazy ideas about food.)
So yeah, I think the parents of this poor baby have serious psychiatric problems. But I also think that the culture they live in gives far too much validation to the idea that thinness = health and health = thinness, and that diet-monitoring can never begin too early. So in addition to heaping blame on the parents, I have plenty of blame left over for every hand-wringing news article hyping the scourge of "childhood obesity" and every parental-advice source that stresses purity of diet.
I read the news articles I linked to above while Colin was eating his lunch. I spread the butter on his whole-wheat toast extra thick and gave him an extra half-slice of cheese.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 04:51 am (UTC)