In mid-September, the North Carolina Institute of Medicine’s Task Force on Early Childhood Obesity Prevention will present recommendations for yet another government attempt to keep kids from getting fat. Based on  minutes of meetings of this group, the government could come knocking at your door.  Carolina Journal’s Sara Burrows reports.

The previous set of recommendations published in 2009 by a related task force – the North Carolina Task Force on Preventing Childhood Obesity – focused on measures like removing sodas from school vending machines, banning most non-cafeteria foods on campuses, and cutting the fat out of milk in preschools and child care centers.

The new task force – created by the North Carolina Institute of Medicine at the behest of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation, and staffed by many of the same government officials and health professionals as the earlier state task force — has taken the mission further, as minutes from its meetings indicate.

At a June 2012 task force meeting, one presentation recommended sending “family support workers” to visit “at-risk” families in their homes weekly from the time a woman becomes pregnant until her child is 5 years old, to teach them how to eat. 

The government employees would be responsible for educating and counseling parents about smoking, breast-feeding, supplemental feeding, nutrition, physical activity, sleep, and “screen time.” A slide in the presentation titled “Intervention” talks about how the family support workers would be responsible for “monitoring” the children’s growth, encouraging exercise and collaborating with medical and other care providers. 

These efforts are contemplated because previous aggressive government intervention have failed. Poor children in North Carolina are just as fat as they were five years ago, says a report released Aug. 9 by the federal Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.

This lack of success has not deterred public-health officials, however, who are considering more aggressive measures, including in-person visits by social workers to the homes of “at-risk” children.

Government officials possess incredible power, and they are rarely deterred when it comes to “helping” people follow government dictates.

The fact is, obesity in kids is no mystery, and preventing it and dealing with it doesn’t require government intervention. It requires parents to make sure their kids get outside and play and that they don’t have a steady diet of high-calories foods. Neither of these two actions requires wealth or government “help.” They require involved parents and families. And that behavior cannot be mandated by government.