An eight year old boy in third grade from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, has been removed from his home after he grew to 218 pounds, weighing nearly as much as four times the usual. The average weight for an eight-year-old boy is 57 pounds - about one quarter of what the Ohio boy weighs.
The 'severely obese' eight-year-old boy was put in foster care by social workers from the Department of Children and Family Services because it was cited that his mother was not doing enough to control his weight, the state agency says.
The boy needs so much medical attention now that the state agency is considering getting a personal trainer to visit his foster home so he can lose weight. The boy is otherwise a normal elementary school student who participates in school activities and makes the honor roll, reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
“This child's problem was so severe that we had to take custody,” Mary Louise Madigan, a spokeswoman for the Department of Children and Family Services, told the Plain Dealer. The mother denied the accusations saying she has worked hard to get her son to shed pounds. She just hasn't been able to get him to keep it off. The mother's lawyers say the county should not have taken the boy. They say the medical issues related to the child do not pose any imminent danger.
This case has sparked debate about the point at which childhood weight problems become child abuse, especially when nearly 20 percent of children aged 6 to 11 are obese. Dr. David Ludwig, a Harvard University pediatric obesity expert, says severe obesity in children can cause diabetes, cholesterol problems, sleep apnea and other conditions that could dramatically shorten the child's lifespan.
Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association Dr. David Ludwig and Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and researcher at Harvard’s School of Public Health said, “In severe instances of childhood obesity, removal from the home may be justifiable, from a legal standpoint, because of imminent health risks and the parents’ chronic failure to address medical problems.”
But Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania ethicist, said obesity isn't like other things that have been labeled child abuse. “A third of kids are fat. We aren't going to move them all to foster care. We can't afford it, and I'm not sure there are enough foster parents to do it,” he told the Plain Dealer.
A trial is set for the boy’s ninth birthday next month to determine whether his mother will regain custody.
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