From Obesity to Foster Care

When my children were young, I did worry about excessive intrusion on our family as regards our choices in parenting. Thankfully, the boys are close to grown and we escaped any of those kinds of worries.

So it was startling for me to read today about a family who’s children have been taken from them and placed in foster care because they didn’t do enough to offset their children’s obesity. What really makes this scary is this note – “The case was such an unusual one because the children had clearly had some very good parenting, as they were polite, bright, and engaging.”

I see so many obese people of all ages here in our rural Missouri environment. I have struggled with healthy weight issues all of my life, I was raised with a high awareness of this and have dieted my entire life with varying success. At the moment I am holding on (sometimes barely) to a decent stability in that regard. I know that it is important.

The case that prompted this blog occurred in the UK. Social services staff at West Sussex county council had told a family court judge about their concerns. The local authority had provided Fitbits (fitness trackers) and paid for gym membership for the family, who had also signed up to Weight Watchers. Months after family court proceedings began there had been no reduction in the children’s weight, and they had not provided recordings from their Fitbits or attended the Weight Watchers appointments consistently.

The judge said the children’s parents did not seem to understand the seriousness of concerns raised by social services staff and had failed to set boundaries and promote healthy eating and exercise. She said the children needed the chance to “learn ways of living more healthily” and to improve their health by losing weight. The judge said there were also concerns about poor home conditions and a lack of guidance on personal care.

“Everyone agrees that this is a very sad and unusual case, of a loving family, where the parents meet many of the basic needs of the children, but the local authority has been concerned that the parents are not meeting the children’s health needs, in that both children are severely overweight, and the parents have shown an inability to help the children manage this condition,” the judge remarked in her ruling.

Figures in 2014 disclosed that up to 74 morbidly obese children were estimated to have been taken into care over a five-year period across England, Wales and Scotland. Children over age 2 or teens whose BMI is greater than the 95th percentile are considered obese. BMI uses height and weight measurements to estimate body fat. Obese children at BMIs of 30, 35 and 40 are defined as class I, class II meaning severe or class III meaning morbidly obese. Class III obese children had a higher waist circumference, systolic blood pressure and fasting insulinaemia (an abnormally large concentration of insulin in the circulating blood) compared with less obese children.

So, I get it. But foster care ? Seems like an extreme solution. I wonder if the parents are also morbidly obese. If so, do we imprison such people as well ? Just saying.

When School Becomes Home

On the car radio on Sunday, I caught the tail end of a To The Best Of Our Knowledge episode – Was The Art Worth All The Pain ? – that was an interview with the visual collage artist, Nathaniel Mary Quinn. What really got my attention was, even though he was not an adoptee – abandonment and trauma issues – were quite similar to what most adoptees experience. And his resilience and maturing perspective on what happened to him in his earlier childhood was inspiring and remarkable. At the end of the episode, he indicates the abandonment he experienced gave him faith in a larger reality that he interprets as Divinely guided in which what happened to him was necessary for him to become what he was capable of.

When he was 15, his family simply disappeared, leaving him to fend for himself at his boarding school. He had earned a scholarship at a really high quality school. His mother had died and when he came home for what he expected to be a Thanksgiving shared with his 4 older brothers and father, he found an empty, abandoned apartment. It was traumatic not knowing where any of his family was but he returned to school and worked hard. Really hard. He developed a study schedule and stuck to it because he knew he was one bad report card away from losing his scholarship and becoming homeless.

At school, he was fed 3 or more meals a day and had to wear a uniform so clothes were not an issue. On Sundays, the school band he was part of at Culver Academy in Chicago would put on a parade performance. Afterwards, when everyone else went to lunch, he went to a mound of grass on a golf course and grieved to a song by Al Green – on repeating loop 10 times – for 4 full years.

Today, he is an acknowledged artist with works included in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His first solo exhibition was at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Quinn’s work is a complicated blend of painting and drawing that achieves the appearance of collage, a combination of human faces with comic book figures and other provocative images. Quinn describes his art as “luminism.”

“The technique of light,” says Quinn. “It’s the torch that I’m carrying from the platform of cubism. Cubism was a technique designed to show multiple angles and viewpoints of a particular object, but to show it on the same plane. “Well, luminism is designed to show the multiplicity of viewpoints and dispositions of the internalized world of that object.”

“Whereas in cubism one would paint the multiplicity of viewpoints of a cup, luminism will show the multiplicity of viewpoints of the internalized world of that cup,” he says. He applies a perspective of luminism to collages of human, often family, figures from his life. His art draws on a difficult upbringing spent in an impoverished public housing project in Chicago with a broken family.

It can be uncomfortable to look at. His collaged and fragmented figures are meant to demonstrate that we are all the sum of our experiences. In his words, “I hope to convey a sense of how our experiences, both good and bad, operate to construct our identities. I also want to portray a mutual relationship between the acceptable and the unacceptable, the grotesque and what is aesthetically pleasing.” Formed from an amalgam of family photographs, images from articles and advertisements, and his own furious brushstrokes and charcoal marks, the men and women who populate his compositions appear as hybrids, at once monstrous and delicate. For Quinn, they are portraits of his fractured family and images of all human beings’ multi-faceted selves.

St Anne’s in Maryland

Some charitable organizations endure. When I saw this article, I thought of Porter-Leath in Memphis but the outcome for my grandmother (losing her infant, for which she was only seeking temporary care until she could get on her feet) was not so good.

St. Anne’s Center for Children, Youth and Families in Hyattsville Maryland has existed for 160 years. They were originally an orphanage and a maternity hospital. The organization founded during a crisis has reinvented itself time and again since. The same could be said for Porter Leath as well.

The organization was created in 1860 to serve women and children during the Civil War and it continued to do so through the 1918 flu pandemic, both World Wars, the Great Depression and now, a new pandemic.

Over the years, it has changed its name and purpose. It went from “asylum” to an “orphanage” to a “center” that now houses mothers and children, sometimes for years, if that’s what they need to successfully escape homelessness.

In recent times, they have seen incredible successes like they had not seen before in terms of families leaving them and going into permanent housing. It’s nothing short of incredible how these families are doing that.

When a single mother with a young child comes to St. Anne’s, she and her daughter are given a furnished apartment complete with a bookshelf filled with children’s books. They share a kitchen, laundry room and playground with other families, but otherwise have their own space.

One such mother said –

“I used to say, ‘I don’t want her to remember any of this stuff,’ ” she says of her daughter. “Now, I want her to see where we were, and how we are in a much more amazing place. I want her to see, ‘My mommy did it, my mommy figured it out, she took care of what we had to take care of.’ ”

When they move into their new house, she says, she wants her daughter to know that from these hard times, her mom created something better for them.

If It Was So Good . . .

why am I so unhappy ?

It is a paradox and difficult to explain beyond the fact that fear and trauma put the child into a survival mechanism. Yes, even with a loving and kind, caring adoptive family, an adoptee can feel messed up a lot of the time. The adoptee may rationally feel like they should be okay with having been adopted by such nice people. Yet, they are sad. There is a trauma that exists deep down in every adoptee whether they ever become aware of it or not. Adoption by strangers is never a normal experience in reality.

Adoptive parents may say, “My adopted child is so close to me. It is like they are attached at the hip.” While this may seem like a good thing, and the adoptive parent interprets this to mean that their child is well adjusted and/or bonded to them, it is actually a fear driven survival instinct in response to an abandonment, even if the child could never define it as such to their adoptive parent.

Sadly, the perspective of many adoptive parents is something akin to owning a possession. In some adoptees, the response to the adoptive parents is similar to repulsion. While an adoptee may attach, it is an attachment based on a longing for what is not there between the adopted child and the adoptive parents. It is inescapable that all adoptees are deprived of something fundamental that affects them developmentally.

The young adopted child will eventually stop crying for the need that can never be met. Unfortunately, in this surrender, the adoptee is seen as “such a good baby”. By the time this happens, the adoptee’s attachment style has already been deeply altered. They adapt.

Adoptees know how to use all of the different attachment coping styles, and switch between them based on the specific situation they find themselves in. Very little of what they are expressing outside reflects their true internal feelings. It is not how they are really feeling or what they are really needing. Mostly it is about appeasing the adult who is caring for them. It is a survival tactic. Always, what is seen, is even so, coming out of a deep and unaddressed trauma.