For kids who face abuse and neglect at home, each day presents a new struggle.

“Most of the kids who have come into contact with Child Protective Services could have been left at home when they were four, or left unsupervised, or they could be dealing with physical neglect, where their house is falling in or they are suffering from food insecurity,” said Jesse Helton, research specialist at the Children and Family Research Center.

On top of these daily struggles, one in four of these children have to deal with obesity as well, according to research conducted by Helton and recently published in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect.

Helton and Janet Liechty, assistant professor in the school of Social Work, used data gathered by Child Protective Services to analyze obesity levels within a group of 5,800 children across the nation who have been investigated for abuse or neglect. 

Their results showed that these children are more at risk of obesity than any other children in the United States.

“Obesity puts children at higher risk for all sorts of bad outcomes,” Helton said. “Kids who are obese are not only stigmatized and bullied, they also have all kinds of internal and external behavioral problems that come around with it.”

Helton also noted that certain demographics suffer from obesity in different ways. 

“Girls in particular are more likely to be depressed when they are obese, and new research is showing that boys who struggle with obesity end up acting out or not doing well in school,” Helton said. “(Obese kids) also have all these health problems such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, etc. It really sets them off on a bad first step in terms of adult health.”

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services funded Helton’s research because previously, little research had been done about the connection between obesity and maltreatment, he said. Karen Hawkins, the department’s deputy director of communications, said that when caseworkers are working with families, the issue of nutrition and health is only brought up if it is an identified issue when they contact the department.

Christy Levine, a researcher at the Children and Family Research Center who worked as a department caseworker for several years, said this is because obesity is just one of the many problems that disrupts the lives of struggling families.

“The social ills that plague everybody are magnified on these families,” Levine said. “I don’t think that any one agency can handle this entire issue.  The most important thing would be to have better coordination with the Department of Health and better coordination within the community so that television and food don’t need to be a source of entertainment for so many families that just don’t have other resources.”

From the perspective of a case worker, Levine mentioned how difficult it is to prioritize health and nutrition issues when supporting a family.

“It is hard for a caseworker who is working with a family that is barely getting by on what they make, to tell them that they should go out and buy more expensive food,” Levine said. “Caseworkers already check water temperature, check the smoke detectors, check fire safety, check the windows and doors … this would add one more thing to the list.”

Helton agreed that other fields such as the medical and academic communities need to help deal with the problem of obesity and nutrition for these families.

“We need to get the academic community on board now and we need the medical community to be aware that this is an at-risk population, if they didn’t know previously,” Helton said. “A lot of these child welfare places are doing these things already, they just have a very difficult situation to deal with.”

There is some debate over the accuracy of the data that was used in the study, he said, due mainly to the fact that the data is reported by the parents, and researchers cannot be certain that parents are reporting correct statistics. Helton, however, believes that, if anything, the amount of obesity that his research showed is actually underestimated, rather than overestimated.

“Caregivers never over-report how much their kids weigh. They are more likely to tell you their kid is 180, rather than 220,” he said. “Actually, our results could be even higher if we got more reliable data.”

Although it is difficult to find accurate data about child obesity and to end neglect altogether, Helton thinks that paying more attention to the nutrition and health of these children could be a solution for obesity.

“If there is a lack of food, families are probably buying high-calorie, low-nutritious food, because it is cheap,” Helton said. “Kids would rather have Cheetos than broccoli, but if you keep feeding your kids Cheetos, they are going to be obese. Hopefully, we can move health up the list of things that caseworkers are concerned about.”

MaryCate can be reached at [email protected].