Obese Teens: A Case of Neglect?

What follows is apparently an item of controversy; no doubt my opinions are probably controversial as well (as if that's a first). I recently found news stories about two overweight teens with similar but not identical.

One story is about a boy who weighed 60 stone at his peak; for people who aren't in the land of Monty Python, that's about 840 pounds. His mother waited on him hand and foot, offering him 8,000 calories a day in food. Apparently Mom had lost a child to a brain tumor at a very young age and so she became rather "addicted" to tending to the whims of her second son.

The second story involves a woman charged with and arrested for neglect because she allowed her 14 year old son to grow to 555 pounds. She was quoted as saying that she had to work fulltime second or third shifts as well as sleep, so she couldn't monitor her son's diet one hundred percent of the time.

The first story has a passive obese person who more or less allowed...and partook in after being offered...downing way too much food and no activity to burn it off until he ballooned. The second story is becoming a case calling into question government's role in regulating our personal lives.

Both of these stories are a question of responsibility. I try to stay consistent to the belief of personal responsibility when there's no mitigating circumstances; for example, I can't control society or its rules, I can only control my reaction and interpretation of them. While I don't know how successful I am in my efforts I try to acknowledge my responsibility in issues and move on from there while also acknowledging the reality of where and how the situation arose.

In other words a lot of people like to blame their parents for how they are today. Your parents and environment certainly do shape the person you've become, however at some point if you wish to function as an adult or as a citizen with privileges you must acknowledge that you're ready to take responsibility for your actions. Just because Mommy was crazy or Daddy neglected you doesn't mean you get off the hook when authorities discover the bodies hidden under your floorboards.

I grew up fat, overweight all my life. I liked eating. I still do. I love food. I need to work on creating new habits to regulate my intake of food; I need to adjust to a new lifestyle. I may have been influences as I grew up by my parents use of food. I think it was a reward as well as a comfort and who knows what other reasons I do it; in the end, I enjoy it, and I enjoy lots of it. So despite the possibility that I was rewarded with food, shown love with food, achieved some comfort from food, there came a time when I needed to realize that I was going to have to change my lifestyle and not live the way I was simply because it was what I knew all my life and was what I was comfortable with. I am now a parent and somehow I don't know how comforting it would be to have a son blaming me for his problems if I'm blaming my parents for...what, giving birth to me? The buck stops when you "man up" and declare that it stops at the last place you have some control. Yourself.

So the next question becomes whether the government has a right to step in and regulate how you live your life. This is complex because in many respects we're so heavily intertwined in our relationships while at the same time we supposedly want the responsibility that comes with our freedoms (okay, we want freedoms, the responsibility part we usually don't want but is part of the package deal). We want government to offer us support and protection; it's a good idea to regulate drinking laws to prevent people from drinking and driving and ramming my car. It's a bad idea for the government to tell me I can't drink a keg of beer sitting on my duff at home all weekend, bothering no one.

The government is stepping in to arrest the mom who "allowed" her teenage kid to become a quarter ton in weight. I think it's her responsibility to make healthy choices known to her kid; but she's also right in saying she can't live his life for him. She can't monitor him 24/7, and believe me, when fat kid wants cake fat kid will find and scarf down chunks of cake. It'll only stop when the kid decides to take responsibility and say, "Nope, not gonna do it." Even in the case of the mom offering all the food and video games to her son (the half-ton son) he could have made up his mind that this needs to be addressed and find help. I'm not saying it's easy.

You'd be an idiot if you have followed my adventures in stapling and other postings about weight issues I've struggled with and think I'm advocating that this is as simple as just shoving the plate away once in awhile. Then again if you cut out empathy and realistic application of the theory, then I suppose it does become that simple.

They are alleging she's neglected him because she didn't get help for him when it was "offered". Of course I don't know the details, but if it's like other help I've seen offered in various forms to various people and agencies over my life, it's not necessarily free help. She said she couldn't afford to get her son the help...if she's working second and third shift jobs, I'm betting she's not financially well off, and the help they're offering is probably psychiatric, or working with a particular gym program, or some special medical or diet plan. I've never found specialized programs that are "cheap." If the government is offering these things for free then hey, yeah, do it. More often than not I've seen the government simply "offer" you things that are mandated as you must pay for it yourself, but still you have to do it and thus basically are being taxed again. The best example I can cite for people to get easy information about this little "mandated tax that isn't a tax" is No Child Left Behind (okay, I think they call them unfunded mandates, but potato, po-tah-to...).

So I don't think the government has the right to arrest Mom for "letting" her 14 year old son snarf down food like a hoover. Additionally it's foolish for them to get involved at this point citing that it's the government's job to be vigilant against cases where parents harm the child's health when the government is making a very healthy load of cash off of various "sin taxes" such as those on big tobacco (and bonuses to the pockets of politicians from the same companies during election campaigns....).

Then there's the slippery slope; very few would argue that a diet of fast food is healthy in the US. In reality...I wonder if you could, eating small quantities of foods (do you really need that double cheeseburger when you can get a plain small cheeseburger?) from fast food joints and not end up in the dire straits of health later on. But that's not entirely relevant when you see that in America that's not how fast food is treated. We overindulge on the whole. So at what point should the government step in for our own sake? Scales installed at the register so if you're over a certain weight you can only order from the "lite" menu? Extra taxes on high-cal foods? There's already legislation efforts creeping around that will mandate certain places have to post calorie information on menus; such rules are already in place in some areas of New York. Maybe the answer to that is that the government steps in when lobbyists don't pony up enough money to have them look the other way.

More and more I see and hear examples of people trying to shove responsibility off on another entity (and more often than not bellyaching when their lack of forethought backfires). If people want to live an unhealthy lifestyle, let them, so long as they aren't hurting other people. The only problem I haven't wrapped my mind around having a reasonable argument against...yet...is the fact that if you're fat, you're not just affecting yourself. I'm not saying this in the "that fat guy took the last slice of pizza" affecting others way, I mean it in the "when that fat guy had a $50,000 operation because of his diabetes brought on by his obesity, my insurance rates are going up too" sort of affecting other people way. I mean it in the "insurance companies are using his weight problem to justify my $10 aspirin" way, and the "my airline ticket costs more because we have more heavy people on board causing issues with fuel prices" sort of argument. See what I mean about relationships causing the issue to be complicated? There's a similar argument wall I run into with seatbelts; why do I need it when if I crash, it would just kill me? The laws are there because of the lobbyists. In part it's because if I survive the resulting legal and medical bills are distributed through insurance and legal and medical entities that then use that to justify passing higher costs to people who weren't involved in the accident or my have the gall to survive the accident.

But at some point the buck has to stop. I'm all for government offering help to people and having programs in place to help. I'm not all for them mandating morality, legislating lifestyle, or making piecemeal of my privacy.