Understanding parent concerns about children’s diet, activity and weight status: an important step towards effective obesity prevention interventions

Abstract

Objective: To identify parents' concerns and attitudes towards children's diets, activity habits and weight status. Design: Computer-assisted telephone interviewing administration of a 37-item survey. Data were weighted for parental education level. Descriptive results are presented, and comparisons are made by the age, gender and parental characteristics of the child. Setting: Online research panel of Australian parents. Subjects: A total of 1202 randomly selected parents of children aged 2-16 years, broadly representative of the Australian population. Results: Parents were concerned about their child's education (reported by 35 % of respondents), child's health and well-being (25 %), and violence, drugs and alcohol (20 %). Concern about nutrition was indicated by 14 % of respondents and concern about fitness/exercise was indicated by 3 % of the sample. Factors perceived as making a healthy diet difficult to achieve for their child were child resistance (89 %), the availability of healthy food (72 %), a busy lifestyle (67 %) and the influence of food advertising (63 %). Ninety-two per cent of parents thought that it was realistic for their child to be active for at least 1 h/d, with 75 % of parents feeling that it was realistic for their child to have less than 2 h recreational screen time per d. Despite this, common barriers to achieving the activity guidelines were lack of time, weather and keeping children occupied. Conclusions: Insights into parental concerns from the current study may be useful in guiding development of interventions to improve children's nutrition and physical activity habits by framing messages in a way that are most likely to resonate with parents.

Associations between parental feeding practices, problem food behaviours and dietary intake in New Zealand overweight children aged 4–8 years

“…In particular, they describe child resistance and picky eating as challenges they find hard to overcome (3,(5)(6)(7)(8) . Parents want to know how to feed their children in a way that brings these problem behaviours under control and results in a healthier diet (4,7,9) .…”

Obesity prevention interventions in Saudi Arabian childrenbuilding the evidence base: An in-depth analysis of sociodemographic characteristics and dietary habits of obese and normal weight schoolchildren

“…Freely available soft drinks and unhealthy snacks for children leads to many unhealthy habits, such as high consumption of sugary drinks and snacks and high fat snacks instead of healthy substitutes, i.e., milk/water, fruits and vegetables [58]. In addition, this highlights the importance of parental control when it comes to having sugar laden soft drinks and junk snacks in the home [59], and may highlight how greater health-conscious parental involvement with their child(s) diet could be a key fact in intervention management and dietary control [60]. Parents who read "food labels" when buying food for their children is a protective factor against obesity.…”

Positive influences of home food environment on primary-school children’s diet and weight status: a structural equation model approach

“…Parents frequently cite a busy lifestyle as a barrier to healthy eating (44) , with children who do not eat family meals more likely to consume fried food away from home (43) .…”