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Government Accused Of Kindness… But What About Ignorance?

One of the currently featured stories on Digg.com is this Guardian.co.uk article on the upcoming campaign against childhood obesity based on an unpublished Department of Health report. As the report is unpublished, the paper correspondent draws our attention to the section of the report titled “Killing with Kindness”. You are very welcome to read the article and draw conclusions yourself, but I commented on Digg about some glaring gaps in the report’s argument and just wanted to add a couple of points.

Outlining “how parents are helping to establish bad habits in their offspring”, the report says:

“Parents believe it is too unsafe to play outside”.

Back in 2005 or 2006 I had to prepare a research paper about how paedofiles should be treated by the society: whether they should be castrated, or kept in prison, or surveilled by the community, etc. The figures and the evidence of sexual crimes against children were astounding. Yet even if we exclude sexual predators, then what about street crime? I am sure I have already lost the track of all the recent cases of kids and teenagers being killed in the streets in the middle of the day. Once happened, these killings are reported across the national media for weeks, if not months. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they should not be reported. However, in the light of this parents are right to believe that it is too unsafe to play outside.

The further quote concerns young mothers:

“Mums lack the confidence to take part in physical activity with their children“.

I admit: looking back at my home country, things would not be critically different: girls as young as 17-18 (once they finished school) would be willing to start a family. To have kids rather than go into education for 3 years, that is. But it took me to come to England in order to seriously question two things: 1) if sexual revolution actually took place? 2) whom did it affect? The number of pregnant teenagers younger that 17 that I had been seeing in the North Manchester working class district for 4.5 years both staggered and amazed me. Fair enough, the subject of whether or not to have sexual education in British schools is still ardently debated, but it also seems that for generations families live in a complete oblivion to the possibilities of contraception or pregnancy management. And no, I’m not speaking of pills whose negative effects on a woman’s health are reported increasingly often. There are other ways, and they are regularly advertised.

So, how does this relate to the problem that the Government highlighted? Directly. To what extent is the Government aware that many of those ‘mums’ are practically children themselves? They are hardly in capacity to bring up their children in an informed way because, as young parents, they are hardly informed themselves. If they are ‘killing’ their kids, it is with ignorance, not kindness.

The Government does mention that the level of information about obesity, good foods, etc. is beyond the desired level. But it isn’t down to kindness. It is down to a huge array of societal reasons – as discernible in the next quote:

“We’re really concerned that parents are using sweets, chocolates and fizzy drinks to reward their children… Food has become an expression of love in ‘at risk’ families. Parents are prioritising filling up their kids over feeding them the right foods. Snacking has become a way of life”.

My reply on Digg was: “Yes, precisely like alcohol. Except that you don’t give alcohol to kids until they grow up. Moreover, young parents, especially if they themselves come from ‘at risk’ families, follow the example they’d taken from their parents”.

I have not had children, but I have had a family. A large amount of things we do or don’t do right when we attempt to create our own ‘nest’ stem from what we saw (or didn’t see) at our parents’ families. For a start, the Government needs to be prepared to break this tradition of ‘unhealthy snacking’ that is running in some families for generations, and that’s a hard graft. Secondly, food on this occasion is hardly an expression of love – it is rather the way to gag a child. This may sound crude because we’re discussing children here, but the Roman ‘bread and circuses‘ can be seen being applied wherever it is more comfortable to numb the pain instead of curing the disease. Parents don’t want kids to scream about their, kids’, disappointments, problems, desires – so they give them sweet foods. Very likely as the kids’ grandparents did to the now parents.

If not kindness, then what is the root of childhood obesity problem? Apart from ignorance, it is indifference. Parents may be very confident that they are doing the best to their kids but this parental love may in fact be a mere disguise. Having said this, though, I am looking at the current situation with the credit crunch. I have had a huge difficulty finding a job (which still hasn’t got resolved), but I am on my own. I can only imagine what people who have children may be going through in my situation. Even if they were not ignorant or indifferent, would they have moral, emotional strength to cook healthy meals every day for the family? Would they have money to buy healthy food? These questions only serve to show that kindness is not at the root of the problem – but does the Government know about it? Or do we see the Government falling into the same kind of ’emotional reporting’ that has plagued the media for ages?

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