Parents should be given a vote for every child that they bring up in order to put pressure on politicians to focus on child health, a top paediatrician has said.
Neena Modi, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said that issues such as obesity were not being tackled.
“If we don’t get this right right now, we will be — and are already — reaping terrible consequences down the line. The latest figures I’ve seen are 10 to 20 fewer years of healthy life if you go into young adulthood obese,” Professor Modi told The Guardian.
To overcome the fact that children, who make up 25 per cent of the UK’s population, do not have a vote, parents should be given a proxy, Professor Modi said. “Why not? My view is that 25 per cent of this democracy is being denied their democratic rights. Society accepts that parents stand as proxies for their children in all other respects. Why not this one too?
“Eighty per cent of obese children will be obese adults and an obese adult will lose 18 years of healthy life. Clearly that is going to have a double whammy on the health of the nation. You lose adult productivity and you impose another burden on the health services. The policy implications are absolutely crystal clear. Break this cycle. But have we seen strategy, coherence, action? No, we’ve seen piecemeal attempts.”
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This week the college released its report State of Child Health, which said that child poverty was at its highest level since 2010 and that 100 out of every 1,000 under-19s were likely to have a mental health disorder. One in three 11-year-olds was overweight or obese.
Professor Modi said that problems within the NHS were most likely to affect children worst and that the public did not understand the effect of poverty on obesity levels. She said that evidence of the link was not being acted upon. “We haven’t taken the lessons of science.”
She argued that the food industry needed to be given incentives to sell healthier food to help to prevent obesity but claimed that the government was too worried about causing friction with large companies.