Childhood Obesity: How Do You Really See Your Little One?

Parents see their children through rose-colored glasses. So they might not notice when junior has put on a few too many pounds, either.

New findings published in the British Journal of General Practice shows us that this is the case for many, unless their child has had advanced to extreme levels of obesity.

Researchers at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and UCL Institute of Child Health examined guidelines and variations seen in different demographics of the population.

They found that many parents are more likely to underestimate their child's weight if they are Black or south Asian versus white and coming from a more economically deprived background.

Furthermore, this identification gap between parental perception and official guidelines, as seen in a different demographic of population, could also help evaluate how effective public health interventions for obesity in children might be among different populations and different groups.

Despite significant efforts to take the issue through intervention programs, researchers found that some parents are still unaware when their child is tilting the scales.

Researchers further examined the issue by identifying certain socioeconomic factors that could predict parents underestimation of their child's weight by collecting questionnaire responses from parents of 2,976 children in five primary care trusts that were involved in the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) ; Redbridge, Islington, West Essex, Bath and North East Somerset and Sandwell.

Findings revealed that 31 percent of parents had underestimated where their child's BMI ranged. The study noted the following regarding weight misrepresentation, according to a news release: "...children are classified as overweight at the 85th centile and very overweight (or obese) at the 95th centile. The team estimated that for a child with a BMI at the 98th centile there was an 80% chance that the parent would classify their child as healthy weight but recognised that parents became more likely to classify their child as overweight when the child had a BMI above the 99.7th centile."

"If parents are unable to accurately classify their own child's weight, they may not be willing or motivated to enact the changes to the child's environment that promote healthy weight maintenance," concluded Senior author Dr Sanjay Kinra, Reader in Clinical Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and co-lead investigator of the PROMISE trial.

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