Parents of Overweight Children More Likely to Consider Kids Healthy Than in Past
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Digital Vision/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Parents of overweight children are more likely than they ever have been before to consider their children “healthy,” despite the fact that childhood obesity has nearly tripled in recent decades.
Researchers looked at data from a pair of national surveys, one conducted between 1988 and 1994 and the other between 2005 and 2010. Parents were approximately 24 percent less likely to recognize their six- to 11-year-old children as overweight in the more recent study. The figure is even more stark among low-income households, where parents are most likely to consider their overweight children “healthy.”
Researchers cited the stigma attached to obesity, increased social pressures and parents’ comparing their children with their childrens’ peers.
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