200 Pound 3rd Grader Put In Foster Care
Quote:
The mother of an obese 8-year-old Ohio boy is denying that she is to blame for her son's weight of more than 200 pounds, which officials cited as a reason for putting him into foster care.
The case became public over the weekend after media in Cleveland reported on it. According to various accounts, the mother, whose identity has been kept private, lost custody of her son in October after case workers in Cuyahoga County said she was not doing enough to control his dangerously high weight.
He should weigh about 60 pounds, based on his height and his age, government workers said.
"This child's problem was so severe that we had to take custody," said Mary Louise Madigan of the county's Department of Children and Family Services. She said county workers had been aware of the problem for more than a year and had been working with the mother in hopes of bringing down the boy's weight.
"We have worked very hard with this family for 20 months before it got to this point," the agency's administrator, Patricia Rideout, said Monday, the Associated Press reported, adding that a judge approved the decision to put the boy into foster care.
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Maybe I'm an asshole, but I agree with this 100%. 20 months is a long time, that's nearly 2 years. If in 20 months of working with social workers the family wasn't able to get a handle on this - they never were going to. And apparently since going in to foster care (in October) the kid HAS lost some weight.
For a frame of reference to make clear how big of a deal it is for a 3rd Grade child to weigh 200 pounds: I am 34 years old, a grown woman. I also happen to be considered "obese". And I don't even weigh as much as that 8 year old does. Think about that. If fat Brandy the adult weighs less than 200 pounds - just how much medical trouble IS this 200 pound child in?