Prosecution could be damaging for the child. If they are aware that their parents are in ‘trouble’ because they are overweight, this could cause psychological problems for the child. Feelings such as guilt, worthlessness and an unhappy body image may occur. These could last well into adulthood and are far more difficult to rectify than a weight problem.
Nearly all of weight related illness occurs during adulthood, when it is the responsibility of the overweight person to take action upon their own bodies. Whilst parents can influence and encourage children to pick up healthy eating habits, they cannot be held accountable later in life when the children have grown up. By this point they must take responsibility for themselves.
We should be educating and helping families not punishing them. Blame is very unproductive and solves nothing. We need to understand the origins of the child’s weight problem in order to gain better understanding, enabling the parent to help their child, not punish them.
It can not be clearly proven that a child’s weight problem is entirely down to nurture over nature therefore there is no clear evidence which would allow prosecution to occur.

It is very difficult for parents to understand what precisely is meant by a healthy diet and therefore we should not consider parents to be the prominent cause of harm.
Products can easily be marketed as healthy by using wording such as ‘honest’ and ‘reduced fat’. It can be very easy for parents to believe they are doing the right thing by buying ‘reduced fat’ snacks. Mass corporations need to take responsibility for the obesity crisis as they manipulate a parents view of healthy. Therefore parents may find it difficult to understand what constitutes as healthy and may have already acknowledged their child has a problem which they do not know how to resolve.
A better solution would involve mass corporations portraying a true, unified understanding of a healthy diet.

Although there are warnings for the dangers, a parent may not necessarily be ignoring these but rather they do not know how to implement changes (see above).
It is a very black and white portrayal to say that an overweight child is a sign of neglect. There are numerous factors which contribute to a child’s weight which are not a result of parental neglect.
Firstly, children spend up to half of their days at school. The food choices that they make during this time are not down to the parent but the child themselves. Even if a parent provides a healthy packed lunch, the child may choose to swap items, or to supplement the lunch with items from vending machines.
Schools too then need to take responsibility for the health of children as they are in charge of them during the day.
The child may also be in the care of a child minder after school, and may even have their evening meals here. Whilst the parent can try their best to guide the child minder on what to feed them, if they can not be there it is out of their hands.