Stories like this just make me crazy. My child is underweight due to her microprematurity, and her doctors have told me that she could possibly always be. To compensate, we have followed their advice and fed her things like whole milk and cheese to try to help her gain weight. This is a real medical reason to monitor a child’s food.

Worrying that your child could become obese if you feed him or her, however, is not a medical excuse to withhold food from a child! It is abuse, plain and simple. As children are growing, they need nutrients to develop brain cells (particularly good fats) as well as the rest of their bodies. To not provide them with this is worse than negligent.

I would be against this even if the child were overweight, as children do not have the food issues we tend to develop and can listen to their bodies. If your child says he or she is hungry, he or she probably is! And it’s your job to provide him or her with a wide variety of healthy foods to begin with.

A couple in Appleton, however, didn’t seem to think this was their job when they withheld foods from a fourteen month old baby. Though the baby’s doctors repeatedly told the couple that she needed more food, the pair ignored medical advice because—get this—they were worried about their baby getting fat.

Is this what the so-called obesity crisis in America has led to? Body and food policing children as young as fourteen months? This child may not even be able to walk yet, but by god, she can diet. Her well baby visits failed to go well at all; in fact, her doctors said that she was both underweight as well as unable to thrive as well as she should have if provided proper nutrition.

Though she was born at 8 pounds, the poor child had only gained three by the time she was a year old. I do not believe in judging parents; we never know what is going on in anyone’s situation other than our own. Perhaps they were poor; perhaps they just weren’t bright enough to realize what they were doing.

But when I hear that they were worried about their baby being fat, I cannot help but get angry at the weight obsession that our country has¸ or the fact that children not even young enough for puberty are going on diets—robbing their bodies of the nutrition they need to grow and thrive. These parents were on a strict diet themselves, which likely spawned their own worry; I do not condone it, but if our national climate were more accepting of people of different sizes, I think this baby might not have suffered this neglect in the first place.