If the academic well-being of our children is worth engendering and accrediting by a way of curricula and diploma, all in the name of a meaningful, productive life, then why is the same no longer true for their physical well-being?  After all, it is the flesh and blood foundation for their academic exercise, and further, for their and the nation’s competitiveness in the family of nations.  How have we allowed these two supporting pillars of education to be separated in drawing up the blueprints for our national child-rearing? Have we become so shorted-sighted, personally indulgent, and fiscally irresponsible that somehow we now see the physical well-being of our children as having entered the realm of a luxury?

In matters of career opportunity, access to health care, and now nutritional foods, we continue to see a widening in the gap between the haves and have nots in the USA, even as that gap continues to close in nations like Brazil which was once the poster-child for such disparity.

Yesterday, in an opinion piece that ran in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. David Ludwig, a child obesity expert at Children’s Hospital in Boston, suggested that some parents should lose custody of their children if those children are severely obese (two million children fall into that category nationwide).  Ludwig’s contention, that state intervention would be a preferable solution for such severely obese children, stirred up a hornet’s nest of criticism from both within the professional fraternity and outside it, as well. (more…)