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 “Today, almost one out of every three kids is overweight or obese,”
said senior author Dr. Jian Zhang of the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of
Public Health at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. “They
are at significantly increased risk of a number of diseases as they
grow older, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease,
osteoarthritis and cancer.”
The first step to dealing with any problem is, of course, being
aware of it, he said.
Zhang and his team examined height and weight data on 2,871
children, ages six to 11, from the 1988 to 1994 National Health and
Nutrition Examination Survey and 3,202 similar kids from the 2005 to
2010 cycles of the survey.
In all cases, the children’s parents were asked if they considered
their child ‘overweight, underweight, just about the right weight,
or don’t know.’
In the 1988 to 1994 data set, 78 percent of parents of an overweight
boy and 61 percent of parents of an overweight girl, identified the
child as ‘about the right weight.’ That number increased to 83
percent for boys and 78 percent for girls in the 2005 to 2010
period.
Similarly, for obese boys, 26 percent of parents said they were
‘about the right weight’ in 1988 compared to 37 percent in 2010,
according to results in Pediatrics.
Like their parents, many kids also identify themselves as about the
right weight even if they are overweight or obese, and those kids
are less likely to try to lose weight (see Reuters story of August
6, 2014 here: http://reut.rs/1oGOJxf).
The increasing trend of weight underestimation is alarming, Zhang
told Reuters Health by email.
“Studies overwhelmingly show that parental perceptions of their
child’s weight influence family readiness to foster healthy
behaviors and increasingly underestimating puts more kids at the
risk of becoming overweight or obese,” he said.
Other studies have shown that overweight adults are increasingly not
perceiving themselves as overweight, said Mary A. Burke, a senior
economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of
Boston.
Burke was not part of the new study.
The misclassification rate was quite high for both time periods, she
told Reuters Health by phone.
“For six to 11 year old children, a lot of parents could say ‘I’m
waiting to make a pronouncement because kids are always changing,
they may grow out of it’,” she said.
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And 'about the right weight’ could reasonably include some kids who
are slightly overweight but close to the healthy weight category,
she said.
“Misperception among obese children is most important,” Burke said.
And though it seems logical that parents who more accurately
perceive their kids’ weight will be more ready to try to change an
overweight child’s behavior, it may not be that simple, she said.
“It’s not clear that if a doctor hammers home that a child is
overweight, the parent will have more readiness to help child engage
in more healthful behaviors,” she said.
“Do you really need to change parental perception first? It may be
more effective to promote healthier behaviors among all kids,” she
said.
Some people mistrust growth charts, she said, but most accept that
good health behaviors like eating right and exercising apply to
them, Burke said.
Parental perceptions might be changing over time as obesity becomes
more common, since people generally judge themselves (and their
children) against the people around them, she said.
It is also possible that more parents are unwilling to admit their
children are overweight due to the increasing stigma of obesity,
Zhang said.
The Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity provides
helpful tips to help children maintain a healthy weight and growth
charts for interpreting their weight class, available at http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/children,
he noted.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1ltNBCt
Pediatrics, online August 25, 2014
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