At practically every prenatal visit, an expecting mother hears that what she eats, how much she moves, and what she herself weighs during pregnancy will influence her baby’s birth weight. “The ripple effect is a war on fat families that contributes to self-hatred and limits their sense of self-worth.”Įven before a child is born, parents are told that we’re responsible for their body size. But people love to blame parents, and especially mothers, when children are fat,” says Brandie Sendziak, a California attorney and legal director of the Fat Legal Advocacy, Rights, and Education Project (known as FLARE), which has provided support in several custody cases where a child or parent’s weight or eating habits were scrutinized or used as leverage in negotiations. “We have never seen a case where a parent was actually doing something ‘wrong’ that resulted in a child’s high weight. Even though plenty of good parents do: 1 in 5 American teenagers is classified as “having obesity” on the body mass index scale, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2014, the Guardian reported, “up to 74 morbidly obese children were estimated to have been taken into care over a five-year period across England, Wales and Scotland.” And whenever these stories make headlines, they not only traumatize the families involved-they also reinforce our broader cultural myth that good parents don’t have fat kids. It happened in Ohio in 2011 and South Carolina in 2009. But this is not the first time that weight has been the motivation for removing kids from safe and loving homes. The whole story might strike you as the stuff of daytime talk show scandals. Sarah Nutter, assistant professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia
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