cause it’s a form of abuse. Very good Question cheers ;)*

I’m not sure about child abuse – but it is very frustrating.
When my oldest daughter was in junior k, one of the girls in her class had a Dr. Pepper in her lunch each day. And not a can, one of the plastic bottles. The rest of her lunch was dreadful, as one could imagine. In her case, I knew her Dad – and he’s a smart guy. So he surely needs a whap upside the head. But in other cases, such as same daughters good friend getting a slushy at the rink, and me telling mine “No”, and the Mom coming to the point where “at least it has juice in it!” – Uh, no. Sugar, colouring and water. She was honestly shocked…boy…where do I begin? There are a lot of uneducated – and I don’t mean college or university – people out there.

And then there are the parents that give into their childs pleas. And then comes the, “well, she just won’t eat anything except chips/twinkies/chocolate bars in her lunch. Nothing I can do about it” sort of person.

That being said, I have been “a mother mindlessly stuffing McDonalds french fries into her baby’s face in the food court.”
Tsk, tsk, I know. But I know it’s nasty.

Oh it is abuse/neglect, no doubt, if the parents know better.

The problem is it will always stay in the theoretical realm of abuse because you can’t make a citizen’s arrest for feeding their kids french fries. If there is any chance of charging them you’d have to follow them and document every meal.

It also gets into issues of personal freedoms and the government becoming a nanny state. How far should their reach go in telling us how to raise our kids? Are fries illegal, but a steak OK?

There’s not much recourse other than giving these parents dirty looks.

charge parents for all the stupid things they do so I think the answer is “no”.

Well, there are several issues here.

1. Your mom in the food court might not feed her kid like that all the time. Junk is quick, it’s there, and it may be a knee-jerk reaction to having a screaming kid in tow and needing to do something about it.

2. It’s often a logistical nightmare (and I say this as someone with none of these problems, but who appreciates that others do have them) to feed one or more kids if you’re a mom who’s isolated, poor, maybe holding down several jobs, and living in one of the UK’s or US’s ‘food deserts’ where buying a burger is easier and cheaper than finding fresh veg. Education is not the only answer to this one.

3. Not all fat kids eat junk (I was one). Not all kids who eat junk are fat. (I for one am baffled at one mom I know who one minute is carefully feeding her toddler organic rice cakes, the next plying him with bags of Haribo to behave, then wonders why he’s totally hyper. Oh, but he’s thin, does that make it OK? The crazy thing is, this woman has a biochemistry degree!)

4. Fat kids’ self-esteem problems have a lot more to do with the whole of our society screaming ‘Fat is evil!’ at every opportunity. Stopping them getting fat in the first place (which many of them will anyway despite, or sometimes because of, anyone’s best efforts) is not the solution any more than sending your teen son to ‘reorientation camp’ is the solution to him getting beaten up for being gay.

I make no attempt to offer a solution….those are just some points for consideration.

First, bravo to Rainbowshappen, especially for #4.

I look at pictures of myself as a pre-teen, and I had an average-going-on-thin body. Of course my anorexic cousin called me “fat” on a daily basis, and no one in my family disagreed with her. I was on self-imposed diets since age NINE. What a waste of life that was, letting my family and society dictate that 100 lbs is only correct weight for every woman on the planet. And it still haunts me 30 years later.

Education? Please. We all had calories and fat content of everything memorized by high school. But “science of nutrition” keeps changing. The four food groups are history, and three of those groups have been shunned by various people: dairy, meat and bread (carbs). Today’s food pyramid was yesterday’s square meal and tomorrow’s…I don’t know…spherical nutrition? (Have to make it sound attractive for marketing purposes.)

Stuffing the kid’s face seems more like a symptom than a problem. Maybe Mom doesn’t pay enough attention to the kid, or is so overwhelmed with work and chores that she has no time for him/her. Would sitting the child down in front of the TV for hours and letting his/her mind turn to mush be worse?

Only if it made the kid fat, I guess. After all, appearance is everything. It made us all judge this mother whose circumstances we don’t even know.

i’m not sure if they should be charged with child abuse but it does set a bad pattern that seems to get repeated over and over .

no….ignorance isnt a crime,even in parenting….

...the more I really resent people who’ve decided it’s not only okay, but their ethical duty to society, to judge people based on a 30-second interaction with them (and sometimes not even that). Maybe we should have wider communities, and be more responsible for one another (but that’s another rant)—what we shouldn’t do is see someone at a food court and make a decision without knowing anything else about them that they’re perpetrating child abuse and we should arrest them/take their kids away.

An off-topic example:
The other day, I was standing outside a bar talking to my mum in the hospital (this was a while ago, she’s fine now). These boys walked up to me and saw a cute girl looking upset on a cell phone outside a bar, and started screaming into the phone that I needed to “dump that trash you’re talking to honey, and get with a real man”. Thankfully, my mum was on too many drugs to understand all the shouting. But my point is you can’t look at someone and know what their Problem is, and if you think you do, you’re projecting, and it’s not welcome, whatever the circumstances.