Parental misperception of their child's weight status: clinical implications for obesity prevention and control.

摘要

TO THE EDITOR: I was excited to read a recent article by Taveras et al. (2011) titled, "Correlates of Participation in a Pediatric Primary Care-Based Obesity Prevention Intervention" (1). A novel and interesting finding from this study is that parents' misperception of their child's elevated weight status was a predominant reason for them choosing not to allow their child to participate in the obesity prevention intervention (eligible children had a Blvll >95th percentile or 85th to <95th percentile if at least one parent was overweight defined as a BMI >25 kg/m2, according to their electronic medical records). While previous studies have found that parents often misperceive their overweight/obese child's weight status (2) and that overweight/ obese children often misperceive their weight status (3), this is the first study, to my knowledge, to have examined whether weight misperception could be a factor in the participation of an obesity prevention intervention. Importantly, there is also a small but growing number of studies indicating that weight misperceivers-both children and adults-are more likely to exhibit unhealthful weight-related attitudes and behaviors (4-8) and a recent study showed that parental misperception of their child's weight status is also associated with their child's unhealthful weight-related behaviors (9).