HALF OF THE parents of overweight children believe that their child’s weight is ‘about right’, a new report says.
Safefood reports today that people’s perception of weight is different to the reality, with 54 per cent of parents of overweight primary school children, and 20 per cent of obese children, thinking that their weight was ‘about right for their height’.
When it came to parents of overweight teenagers, they were even less accurate in their judgement – 75 per cent of them thought their teen’s weight was ‘fine’.
Parents were 86 per cent less likely to be correct about their child’s weight if their child was overweight and approximately 59 per cent less likely to be correct if the child was obese, compared to parents of normal weight children.
Currently two in every three adults are overweight or obese on the island of Ireland, but less than four in ten adults actually believe they are overweight, said safefood.
Data shows that around a quarter of children, meanwhile, are overweight or obese.
Assessing weight
Dr Cliodhna Foley-Nolan, the director of human health and nutrition at safefood said:
Not recognising our own weight status or indeed, our children’s weight status represents a major barrier to making any future changes to our lifestyle. Being overweight now is the norm and as a society we must recognise our bodyweight before we can realistically begin to make positive changes, especially for our children.
The results are contained in Bodyweight Perception on the island of Ireland, which is available to read here.
The report showed that awareness is often considered a pre-requisite to positive change occurring, but with adults or carers not recognising unhealthy weights, they are unlikely to seek information and health from health professionals.
Dr Foley-Nolan said that bodyweight is an extremely sensitive and personal issue, and that among children, assessing body weight should be viewed in the same way as hearing or sight tests. She said it should be “as a measure of a child’s developmental progress and not in any way as a criticism of parenting”.
The report also notes that media framing of obesity may be important in determining recognition of bodyweight status, and blaming individuals can undermine efforts to address weight issues. It suggests that work should be done with the media to “address uncertainty, mistrust in experts” and confusion about what constitutes a health weight.
It also says that health professionals “lack confidence and training in measurement and communication of bodyweight”, and so recommends training programmes to address this.
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