A group of child health specialists in England and Ireland are reportedly of the belief that if parents fail to make it possible for their obese children to lead a healthy lifestyle, children should be removed from the home and put into foster care.

In a paper published online on Wednesday in the British Medical Journal, experts said, “Childhood obesity can be seen as a failure to adequately care for your children by failing to provide a healthy diet and sufficient activity, whether through direct neglect or more subtly through an inability to deny children the pleasures of energy dense fast food and television viewing.”

Children with diseases such as asthma and epilepsy whose parents fail to provide proper care can be placed in foster care, so some are asking the question of whether obese children at risk for chronic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes should be removed from their homes as well.

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It seems a little extreme to me, but I do recognize that there may be extreme cases in which foster care could be the best case scenario for a child on multiple levels. There are so many co-factors, I feel this is an issue that would definitely need to be handled on a case-by-case basis.