Fat children and bad parenting

You saw, I guess, the NYTimes story last week about the huge number of American children having to take drugs to control obesity-related medical conditions (Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, etc.). Obesity rates in children over the past 20 years have skyrocketed. If you were an obese child, you stand an excellent chance of being an obese adult, or at least struggling with weight all your life I've said here many times before that I was a fat child who has had weight problems all his adult life, thanks in large part, I'm convinced, to bad eating habits established in childhood. I jumped on Michael Savage for blaming autism on bad parenting; there's absolutely no reason to conclude that, except ignorance.

But I do believe that a lot of the obesity epidemic in children boils down to bad parenting. I'm raising three kids, one of whom has a serious sweet tooth. If we kept snack foods around the house freely accessible to the kids, or let them eat as much as they wanted, or fed them a laissez-faire diet of processed and junk food, well, they'd be fat kids too. This, especially because we live in the city, and they don't have a chance to exercise as much as kids who live elsewhere.

But we don't let that happen. We do our best to make sure our kids eat decent meals. It's hard to say "no" to them, especially in a consumerist culture that's constantly pushing crap food at them -- but isn't that what being a good parent is all about? Teaching self-discipline and self-control, especially in a culture that praises indulgence of all kinds?

I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, because I know I fail my kids in lots of ways. But I am trying to express how frustrating it is to me to see so many obese or seriously overweight kids these days, and to see parents acting like obesity is just something that happens to these kids, like a chronic earache. When I was growing up, I got to eat whatever I want. I'd get off the school bus and plow through half a bag of Fig Newtons and two Coca-Colas while watching Gilligan and Hogan's Heroes. Food was love in my culture, and it was unthinkable to us that parents who loved their kids would deny them cookies, chips and Cokes.

That's how I entered fifth grade weighing 150 pounds.

Look, I'm not saying that every obese kid got that way through neglectful parenting. But I am saying that it's not right to blame young children for their weight problems. The responsibility falls chiefly on the heads of those in charge of their care and feeding: parents. Parents who don't do their jobs in controlling what their kids eat, and developing good eating habits in their kids, are setting those children up for a lifetime of physical and emotional distress, to say nothing of big doctor's bills and possibly an early death.

We would be aghast if parents let their children smoke; why is there no stigma attached to parents letting their kids routinely gorge on junk food? It's obscene that hundreds of thousands of American children have to be treated with statin drugs and the like. What is the role of adults in bringing about this situation? That's all I'm asking.