Active Low-Carber Forums - View Single Post - Parents are to blame for obese children

An interesting and (potentially) controversial comment piece in The Telegraph this morning about child obesity and parental responsibility.

Just who is responsible?

Quote:

Parents are to blame for obese children - not governments

As new statistics show one child under five is admitted to hospital for obesity every week, parents must take responsibility

Celia Walden

When a handful of British children went back to school for a nano-second at the end of June, a teacher friend described the moment she watched her pupils filing into the classroom as “jaw-dropping.” Many of her Year 2s “had gained up to a stone and could no longer fit into their uniforms,” she lamented. “One had put on so much weight over lockdown that even his gait had been affected.”

Yes, but we’ve all piled it on since March. Yes, but with playgrounds and swimming pools closed and sports clubs suspended, it’s been so much harder to get kids out of the house. Yes, but the boredom factor can’t be underplayed here: all that extra time while parents were working from home had to be filled with something, namely snacking and sucking on the iTeat.

Here’s a final ‘yes, but’ – and it’s the only one that matters: yes, but one child under five is being admitted to hospital every week because of obesity. One child. Every week.

If you think the new NHS figures – released on Sunday – are shocking; if you’re struggling to take in the extra 534 boys and 420 girls under five admitted to hospital with obesity as their “secondary cause of admission” between 2019 and 2020, consider this: these figures won’t take into account the lockdown damage: the tiny shuffling figures teachers will watch filing into their classrooms next week. They won’t acknowledge the boy whose very ability to walk had been affected… by what? By a basic lack of parental accountability.

We’re not allowed to talk in generalisations anymore. They’re offensive, exclusionary and above all true, which to use one of the most irritating PC-isms of the day is “problematic”. It’s also why they’ve been vetoed. But here’s a whopper for you: Brits aren’t great at personal accountability. Somewhere in our country’s flamboyant rejection of puritanism and restraint, we have decided that personal accountability is an outmoded concept.

If we want to drink ourselves silly, why shouldn’t we? If we wanted to gorge on junk food – during lockdown and for years prior to that – ditch the wearing of ties to formal engagements and rock up to business meetings in shorts and flip-flops, we should be entitled to do that. We are now Let It All Hang Out Britain, with our own Prime Minister the poster boy, despite his U-turn on obesity. Just look at the state of him in the Highland holiday snaps he chose to release to the nation: artfully dishevelled, in stained trousers. All very touching in a ‘new dad’, only this man represents the country.

Europe will be as appalled by those images as it is by the figures that, yet again, put Britain at the top of childhood obesity tables. Only they won’t be asking themselves how the government has allowed this epidemic to thrive to such shameful levels or indeed why schools haven’t done more to instill healthy eating habits in their pupils, but why British parents would be so slovenly as to put their own offspring at risk of a lifetime of health complications – complications that have risen by 80 per cent in terms of hospital admissions, according to the NHS, over the past year alone.

You’d think that when a child’s diabetes, asthma, depression, fatty liver disease and joint pain sets in, parents would have to be confronted by their own failings, but because of our lack of accountability all we then do is blame others. It’s the fault of supermarkets for selling so much junk, advertisers for cynically promoting that junk, and food manufacturers for conning us with sugar-packed “healthy” snacks featuring our little ones’ favourite cartoon-characters on the packaging. It’s “genetic predisposition.”

And all of those things do play a part, but every health professional discussing obesity with any degree of honesty will tell you that part is minimal when compared with parental influence and accountability.

Reacting to the NHS figures on Sunday, Caroline Cerny, of the Obesity Health Alliance, implored the government to do more “especially in the early years” of a child’s life, and especially with “the most deprived communities”, where as many as 33 per cent of children are expected to be obese by 2030, if the wealth gap continues to widen.

Thanks to Covid, it will. And both the government and schools need to do their bit in educating the parents in those deprived communities from pregnancy onwards. But what about the middle-class mums who buy their children a cupcake-a-day to make themselves feel better? What about the cross-class culture of TV dinners Britain has embraced for years?

Short of putting the Coco Pops behind bars alongside fags and alcohol in shops, rationing sugary drinks and issuing health warnings with every McDonalds, the government’s obesity strategy can only ever be a starting point. Beyond that it comes down to the “self-discipline” and “resolve” the Queen mentioned in her “We Will Meet Again” address in April – an address that was unforgettable because those attributes have largely been forgotten.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/l...ot-governments/