At least one out of every six children ages 1 to 6 are too beefy to fit into their child safety seats – and need extra-large “husky” seats designed for proto-Elvii. That works out to something like 190,000 Tubby Toddlers, or about 5 percent of all the three-year-olds in the country.
This isn’t baby fat we’re talking here, either. These are three-year-olds who weigh in at 40 pounds or more. These kids are on a (fast food) track to being 200 pounders by their teens. Those gummi bears and juice boxes really add up. That and a Pixar-watching, Play Station lifestyle. As we get fatter and fatter, so do kids – emulating the example (and lifestyle) of their parents.
So what do the Wise Heads suggest? The obvious answer – stop eating so damn much and maybe go outside and do something for awhile instead of pretending to do something via playing a video game – doesn’t come up in any of the coverage one can find about this story. Instead, we get calls for super-sized car safety seats – units titanic enough to hold Baby Fatima so that she’s not injured in the event of a car wreck. That she’ll end up a teen diabetic and dead from heart disease by 50 – doesn’t seem to matter. So much easier to just build a bigger seat than put not-so-junior on a diet.
The car seat study appears in the journal, Pediatrics,which is associated with Johns Hopkins Hospital. One of the study’s authors, Lara Trifiletti, decided to look into the matter after she discovered researchers evaluating the functionality of child safety seats were encountering problems finding seats to fit/properly restrain obese children.
According to federal data, almost one quarter of all American children ages 2 to 5 are overweight; 10 percent are medically obese and at elevated risk for developing early-onset diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other potentially life-threatening illnesses directly associated with being beefy.
These weighty waddlers need wide-load seats like the $250 Britax “Husky” – No, I am not making this up – designed to handle kids who weight up to 80-lbs. Remember, this is for 3-5 year-olds. Hopefully, the parents of these kids are going to the gym – because they’ll need Popeye-sized biceps to heft their little giants onboard the family SMooVee. Maybe the automakers will develop a special auto-winch system? Or heavy-lift running boards?
Britax spokeswoman Joyce Kara told the Associate Press that the childhood obesity epidemic is “something that we do keep in mind when designing our seats to make sure our seats are versatile in accommodating all sizes of children.”
They might be better served if someone sent them a free season pass to Golds Gym.
Meanwhile, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is looking into new regulations which would apply to these super-sized child seats – and will be using a crash test dummy carrying an extra 25 pounds to simulate an 80-lb. youngster. No word as to whether the shock absorbers on the cars involved will also be tested (or upgraded to handle the load).
It’s ironic that our society, so concerned with protecting children against the most abstract and improbable outside risks, seems indifferent to clear evidence of a real (and, literally, “growing”) crisis – porky kids. You’d think that parents would take notice of their child’s expanding girth (and their inability to find a child seat that fits) as evidence of a problem with the child, not an excuse to go shopping for “Husky” kinderclutter.
Childhood obesity was pretty rare 20 years ago – in the pre-Playstation age. Now it is a commonplace. But our genetic make-up hasn’t mutated in this short span of time. But our lifestyles and attitudes have.
No one’s doing these kids any favor by accommodating their wide-load waistbands. Sure, it’s easier for their also-beefy parents to adopt a policy of benign neglect than it is to make major changes in how they (and their children) live. But if current trends continue, being a disgusting fat slob will become the new normal – and the handful of skinny kids who somehow haven’t swelled up to Oprah-like dimensions after a steady diet of high fructose corn syrup, chicken McMaggots and inactivity will just have to make do with flopping around in “Husky” car seats designed to fit the New American Child.
Throw it in the Woods?
Childhood obesity is a problem for the same reason that it was for that annoying fat kid that we all knew and LOATHED when we were kids: Mommy would rather shove food into the kid’s mouth to shut her/him up rather than do her job as a mother; and Daddy is either not around or may as well not be (i.e., he’s a gutless wimp whom won’t stand up to the mother and the kid).
That’s why I never hesitate to take my small grandkids to the park or for a bike ride; I can always use the exercise, but it’s for THEIR benefit…they just need to get out and MOVE!