Should Parents Be Charged With Child Obesity if their child is overweight?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Rodriguez 2                                                                                                        

Cesar

Mrs.Rogers 

English 3 

2/27/17

                               Should Parents Be charge with Child abuse if they have an obese child?

      Parents play a big role in their child's health. Today we are seeing more children and teens being overweight. More children today have serious health issues with their body mass and are obese because of what they eat at home and at school. Many parents do not realize what harm they are doing to their child's health. Parents have a huge responsibility on their child's health. Based on the article "Childhood Obesity and Medical Neglect", parents are responsible for their child's health. The article states, " Parents are responsible for the care of their children, regardless of whether the cause of a medical condition is a behavior, a disease, or an interaction of the 2." Many parents may give their child fat foods like ice-scream and pizza. Parents should realize that it is fine to give them pizza once in a while, but it is not fine to give them pizza every day. 

There are many more reasons for why parents should be responsible for the health of their child. One of the ways are that parents know what foods is nutritional to eat and decides not to buy it for their child and themselves, they decide to buy what is not nutritional like hot dogs and pizza knowing that their child is obese, then that would be consider child abuse.

If starving a child is consider child abuse, then why should overfeeding their child not be an abuse to his or her child? Based on the article "Parents of Obese Children and Charges of Child Abuse", the article admits," In other words, if a parent who endangers a child's health by starving her or him can be charged with abuse, why should a parent who endangers a child's health by over-feeding her or him not also be subject to these charges? " 

If a parent knows that their child is overweight or obese and do nothing to help him loss weight, then this would be considered a way of the child abuse. If the parents do nothing to help the child, then they would be fine by up to $800 according to BBC, "If food is the problem, it would be up to parents to set a diet and exercise programme, with monthly visits by officials to make sure it's being kept up. After six months, they would examine the child again. Parents would face fines of up to $800 (£525) if there was no improvement within a year."    

  This can be very controversial in different countries like Puerto Rico. Poor countries may not have the money to buy enough nutritional foods. Because of their economy as a family or as a parent, they may not always have the money to buy good nutritional foods. Based on the article "Could fining parents cut childhood obesity" , it admits, " But the Puerto Rico obesity plan has echoes of the action taken in the UK and elsewhere to combat persistent truancy from school. In March last year, it was revealed that a record number of truancy fines had been handed to parents but that persistent truancy was falling. But there has been criticism that there is no link and that fines do not work. Some critics believe fines disproportionately affect poor parents."

 In many countries were economy is low for parents, it is not always the parents fault. Parents try to give their child a place to live and a place to eat were they have to survive to keep their family in good standing. This can be seen in Puerto Rico and not only Puerto Rico but also Mexico and Africa. Economics have a big role in these types of countries. People have to survive, families have to survive. For the low economy that he or she has, they tend to buy cheap foods that have a lot of cholesterol and sugar. Parents know what is good for their child, parents that do not have the problem of economy, and buys fat foods knowing that their child is obese, should be charge with child neglect.      

NOT SURE WHY SOME OF YOUR ITEMS ARE UNDERLINED AND BOLD. I AM  SEEING SOME IN TEXT CITATIONS BUT NO MLA FORMATTED SOURCES. YOU NEED TO PROOFREAD YOUR POST.