Children Removed from Home Due to Weight

According to The Guardian , two children were removed from their parents’ care after social services raised concerns about their weight to a family court judge in England. The Social Services staff at West Sussex county council told a family court judge that the local authority had provided fitness trackers and paid for a gym membership for the family, who had also signed up to Weight Watchers. But there was no visible reduction in the children’s weight, nor did the family provide information from their fitness trackers or attend Weight Watchers appointments consistently. The judge said the children’s parents didn’t understand “the seriousness of concerns raised by social services staff and had failed to set boundaries and promote healthy eating and exercise. She said the children needed the chance to ‘learn ways of living more healthily’ and to improve their health by losing weight,” according to The Guardian. Wow. Where do we begin? First of all, why is a number of a scale still a factor in health? How does weight correlate with a family’s ability to take care of their children? If the children were gaining weight at an alarming rate was such a concern to all involved, where were the medical doctors to evaluate? Fitness trackers and weight loss clinics cannot factor in true medical issues like genetics. This isn’t the first time a child has been removed from their home due to their weight. According to The Guardian, a five-year-old girl was taken into care after her weight reached 66kg (10st 5lbs), in Wales back in 2012. In 2014, disclosed more than 70 morbidly obese children were estimated to have been taken into care over a five-year period across England, Wales and Scotland.