Parents should be held responsible, but many parents are far from being such.
Either we deal with that reality, or face the consequences of not doing so, which you point out.
I have seen, first-hand, the consequences of malnutrition on children in my own community. Setting aside the ethical/moral dimensions of that, the economic loss of what those children, someday to be adults, might have achieved but for consistant meals when they were young, erk.
Setting aside the economic dimensions, I think we have a moral dhttp://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/flag.gifuty to do so.