Obese Children

Walk through any ordinary grocery store in America and you will witness, if you are observant, a wide variety of forms of child abuse. In the super Walmart possibly more than in your higher end store, but not necessarily. For the purposes of this discussion I am not including your large health food groceries where a more peaceful ambiance seems to hold sway and healthier children seem to be more prevalent. We've all seen the snap, the slap, the yell. We may have been tempted to the same. We think we have refrained for the most part. And mostly we walk away thinking "how awful" but what can I do. Generally not much. The most common form of obvious child abuse is the obese child. I think we have gotten so accustomed to seeing fat people that we have become situationally blind to it. But I find myself keenly aware of the fat children. Frankly I want to beat the parents to death. I participate in my own forms of self-abuse, as do we all. Children, however, don't have the information or ability to make certain choices for themselves, we the adults do it for them. We make the choices that fill our shopping carts with sugar soda, fatty chips and pre-fab dinners full of carbs, fat and sodium; not to mention the empty calories. We make the choices that puts junk food in our children's hands and dinners on the table that include no green vegetables; bread and butter at every meal - its the American way. My stepmom says a green veg and a red/yellow veg at every meal (meaning a tomato or carrots). While I have not been able to keep up with it as much as I should since she stopped cooking for us and went home, we try. Just as everything we feed ourselves is a choice, so is everything we feed our kids; and those are choices with long-ranging effects. Childhood obesity and diabetes is epidemic in this country. Our choices create life long patterns of eating in our children. Just as we try not to pass on our other bad habits, we shouldn't let our busyness, our laziness, our apathy or our ignorance be our excuse for passing on our bad eating habits. We think, oh, I'm in a hurry, it won't hurtp just this time. But "this time" multiplies and before you know it, you have an obese child. I don't much care what people do themselves (at least in this context), but it is child abuse to do it to your children