China, a couple has come under fire from both the media and the general public after allegedly filming their young, overweight daughter devouring whole plates of food and streaming the footage online.
Can be seen pictures and video of a three-year-old girl stuffing her face with various food. The picture and videos went around on the Chinese social media and sparking outrage among viewers.
The parents are being slammed for abusing their child and using her as a cash cow by not only encouraging her to eat unhealthy amounts of food but also streaming when she was eating on social media. The three-year-old channel was recently removed from a popular video streaming platform, because of the online uproar surrounding this case. Her parents then deny the accusations, saying that their daughter just has an unusual appetite, but is otherwise healthy.
“Our videos not only included her eating food, as well her losing weight and dancing,” the girl’s mother told reporters.
“She’s my birth child, why would I intentionally feed her that much? She has always been a big child,” she added.
“We have jobs and don’t lack money, we just want to record the ‘growth’ of our child,” her father added. “We did make a little bit of profit, maybe a few hundred yuan, but that is just a number to us.”
The mother surnamed Tan said the girl weighed 4.5 kg at birth and had always put on weight very easily. According to local Chinese media, the three-year-old weighs around 35 kg, much more than most kids her age. Her mother then says it’s because she loves eating, but has no interest in sports.
Ixigua.com, a Chinese video platform, said that it made the decision to close Pei Qi’s account after receiving numerous complaints from viewers regarding child abuse. It claims that in a since-deleted video, Pei Qi told her parents to “stop feeding her” only to have her plate immediately filled again.
Pei Qi’s channel is believed to have been inspired by “mukbang”, a South-Korean online video genre in which a host will be consuming large quantities of food while interacting with their viewers. Chinese President, Xi Jinping recently critiqued the genre as wasteful and many prominent mukbang channels have since been deleted.
There is an official organization that protects the rights and welfare of Chinese women and children has launched an official investigation into Pei Qi’s case. Meanwhile, the general public seems to have already made up its mind about who is to blame on the case.
“This is child abuse! Some people don’t deserve to be parents. This is making me so angry!” one person commented.
Someone else added, “The parents are using the child as a cash cow. They don’t care about the child’s health and well-being at all!”.
Source: Oddity Central