We all know that too many American kids are fat. Or do we?
When it comes to our own sons and daughters, researchers say, the truth isn’t necessarily evident.
A new study published online in the March issue of Pediatrics found that 51 percent of parents with overweight or obese children don’t think their kids are too heavy.
“They’re pretty dismal results, to be honest,” said lead study author Alyssa Lundahl, a graduate student in the clinical psychology program at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
The findings show that families might benefit from greater awareness of “what a healthy weight looks like,” Lundahl said.
The parent-perception analysis compiled data from 69 studies involving nearly 16,000 children worldwide. Those studies took place from 1990 to 2012 and focused on children ages 2 to 18.
Although obesity rates increased over that time, the parents’ perceptions of their kids’ weight did not.
Dr. Ihuoma Eneli, the medical director at the Center for Healthy Weight and Nutrition at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, said the findings sound spot-on.
“That’s my experience in practice,” she said. “There is a disconnect between the child’s actual weight and the parents’ perception of the child’s weight.”
One reason is that more kids are overweight now, muddying the notion of a typical weight, Eneli said. The difference is important because “most people make changes or feed their children based more on their perception rather than the actual weight.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one-third of the nation’s children are overweight or obese.
Lundahl and co-author Timothy Nelson, an assistant professor of psychology, found that parents of younger children — ages 2 to 5 years — were most likely to underestimate weight problems, possibly because they think their kids will grow out of it. Parents also were less accurate about the size of their sons, deeming boys of normal weight too small.
And parents who were overweight themselves were less likely to come up with a correct assessment of their children’s weight, the study found.
The researchers did the same analysis by reviewing 52 studies involving 65,000 normal-weight children and found that some of those parents also underestimated their children’s weight. About 14 percent of those with normal-weight children thought their kids were underweight.
The CDC assesses children’s weight according to their body-mass-index growth charts. Children in the 85th to 94th percentile are considered overweight, while those in the 95th or above are classified as obese.
Eneli said those rankings are best viewed over time, taking into account behavior, genetics and weight fluctuations. When the trend becomes a concern, “It’s OK to open the discussion by showing them the little dot on the chart and saying, ‘What do you think?’ Show them the trajectory,” Eneli said. “Most parents, if you do it that way, are less defensive.”
Lundahl cited one study in which parents said they would rather be told that their child has a hearing problem than a weight problem.
“There’s a lot of stigma,” she said. “It really does show how much more research needs to be conducted on these conversations and how to go about them.”