Differential Influences of Parenting Dimensions and Parental Physical Abuse during Childhood on Overweight and Obesity in Adolescents

Abstract

Besides other explanatory variables, parenting styles and parental violence might also be responsible for setting a path towards overweight/obesity in childhood. While this association has consistently been observed for adults, findings for adolescents still remain scarce and inconsistent. Therefore, the goal of this study is to add evidence on this topic for children and adolescents. Analyses are based on a sample of 1729 German, ninth-grade students. To analyze associations between parenting dimensions and weight status, non-parametric conditional inference trees were applied. Three gender-specific pathways for a heightened risk of overweight/obesity were observed: (1) female adolescents who report having experienced severe parental physical abuse and medium/high parental warmth in childhood; (2) male adolescents who report having experienced low or medium parental monitoring in childhood; and (3) this second pathway for male adolescents is more pronounced if the families receive welfare. The importance of promoting parenting styles characterized by warmth and a lack of physical abuse is also discussed. This is one of only a few studies examining the association of parenting dimensions/parental physical abuse and weight status in adolescence. Future studies should include even more parenting dimensions, as well as parental physical abuse levels, in order to detect and untangle gender-specific effects on weight status.

Identifying Predictors of Inpatient Verbal Aggression in a Forensic Psychiatric Setting Using a Tree-based Modeling Approach

“…This means that the algorithm starts by investigating every possible binary split amongst the predictor variables and chooses the one split that leads to the most substantial difference between the two resulting groups regarding their distributions on the dependent variable (generally measured by impurity or entropy measures such as the Gini-index; e.g., James et al, 2017; Strobl et al, 2009). Over the past 50 years, numerous algorithms have been developed within the framework of tree-based modeling (Loh, 2014), and especially in recent years the popularity of this method has grown substantially amongst researchers from various fields (e.g., Fritsch et al, 2019; Kern et al, 2019; Mößle et al, 2017; Schivinski, 2021; Neumann et al, 2019). The major advantages of tree-based models include the ability to handle data sets with a large number of predictor variables (“large p , small n problem”), the possibility to detect intricate interaction effects, and the intuitive visualization method as a tree-structure.…”

Origin of obesity in adolescents: impressions of family caregivers assisted in primary health care / Origem da obesidade em adolescentes: impressões dos cuidadores familiares assistidos na atenção primária à saúde / Origen de la obesidad en los adolescentes: impresiones de los cuidadores familiares..

“…De fato, estudo alemão recentemente publicado mostrou que estudantes do gênero feminino que sofreram violência física na infância tiveram uma maior chance de apresentarem sobrepeso e obesidade na adolescência. Os autores recomendam que as ações globais para a prevenção da obesidade considerem a dinâmica e as relações intrafamiliares (24) .…”