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Family law & child obesity

Modern day life creates always creates new legal points and challenges and those which arise relating to family law often involve a very sad aspect also.

One aspect of life which has become an increasing problem in western society but where the family law implications are not always obvious relates to childhood obesity. This has been a particular issue in the USA but the problem is now getting steadily worse in other western countries.

In family law terms, at what point could a child’s gross obesity become a legal issue such that the child is removed from his or her parents ? We are unaware of any English law precedents on this issue but in the USA there are some precedents.

In Cleveland, Ohio, an 8 year old has been placed in foster care because his mother was not doing enough to control his weight, which was grossly excessive.

For more on this particular story, click here.

What do you think about this issue – should the law intervene in these circumstances and if so, how ?

We saw some very interesting figures quoted on another site this week, which we believe our readers will be interested in and which demonstrate just how big an impact the proposed legal aid cuts are likely to have on divorce. The figures are from 2009 but there’s no reason to suppose they will be radically different this year or last year. so, here goes :-

• In 2009,  just under 114,000 divorce petitions were started.
• Over 87,000 of those divorces were funded by legal aid.
• Some 70% of divorce petitions are started by women and a proportion of those will obviously be non-working mums who do not have their own income.

Whether you are for or against divorce being fairly easy to obtain in England & Wales or for or against the legal aid system, the above clearly shows that removing legal aid in areas like divorce will have a very significant impact which is difficult to predict. With unhappy families forced to stay together, could there be a devastating impact on children ? With more people forced to go to court themselves will this result in huge extra resources being needed to run the courts thereby making the costs savings of cutting legal aid a farce ?

These are just a couple of possible if not likely outcomes, there are likely to be many more. what is your opinion ? Please do let us know.