*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on PsychCentral.
Children whose parents considered them to be overweight tended to gain more weight over the following decade compared with children whose parents thought they were a normal weight, according to new research.
The findings indicate that children whose parents identified them as being overweight perceived their own body size more negatively. This made them more likely to attempt to lose weight, factors that partly accounted for their weight gain, according to the researchers.
“Although parents’ perception that their children are overweight has been presumed to be important to management of childhood obesity, recent studies have suggested the opposite — when a parent identifies a child as being overweight, that child is at increased risk of future weight gain,” write psychology researchers Drs. Eric Robinson of the University of Liverpool and Angelina Sutin of the Florida State University College of Medicine.
Their study was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
“We argue that the stigma attached to being an overweight child may explain why children whose parents view them as being overweight tend to have elevated weight gain during development,” the researchers add.
Drawing from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, Robinson and Sutin examined data for 2,823 Australian families.
As part of the study, researchers measured the children’s height and weight when they began the study as four or five year-olds. At that time, the children’s parents reported whether they thought the children were best described as underweight, normal weight, overweight, or very overweight.
Later, when they were 12 or 13, the children used a series of images depicting bodies that increased in size to indicate which image most resembled their own body size. The children also reported whether they had engaged in any behaviors in an attempt to lose weight in the previous 12 months.
Researchers took height and weight measurements again when the children were 14 or 15 years old.
The results indicated that parents’ perceptions were associated with children’s weight gain 10 years later, according to the researchers. Children whose parents considered them to be overweight at age four or five tended to gain more weight by age 14 or 15, the study found.
Source: PsychCentral
http://psychcentral.com/news/2017/01/15/childs-weight-gain-increases-when-parents-see-them-as-overweight/115102.html