Childhood Obesity among Puerto Rican Children: Discrepancies Between Child’s and Parent’s Perception of Weight Status

Abstract

Public concern about childhood obesity and associated health problems calls for the identification of modifiable factors that could halt this epidemic. Parental perceptions of their children’s weight status could be associated to how parents influence children’s eating patterns. We aimed to identify the perceptions Puerto Rican parents have of their children’s weight and children’s own perceptions of weight status as compared to real weight. A cross sectional survey was performed in a representative sample of 1st–6th grade students. Only half of the children correctly identified their weight, and only 62.4% of the parents correctly classified their children’s weight. Most obese/overweight children did not perceive themselves as such. Almost half of obese/overweight children were identified by the parents as normal weight while over half of the underweight children were perceived by their parents at normal weight. More girls than boys perceived themselves as obese/overweight and more parents of girls than of boys perceived them as such. Higher-educated parents were better at recognizing overweight/obesity among their children compared to less-educated parents. This study suggests an influence of parents’ SES characteristics on their perceptions of children’s weight status as well as on children’s own perceptions of their weight status.

A Comprehensive Review of School‐Based Body Mass Index Screening Programs and Their Implications for School Health: Do the Controversies Accurately Reflect the Research?

“…Demographic characteristics of parents have been highlighted as predictors of accuracy in determining a child's weight status. Some studies have found that higher parental education level was associated with better accuracy in determining a child's weight status, whereas others have found race/ethnicity to be an important indicator of child weight misperceptions. In one study about the effectiveness of BMI report cards to improve accuracy of parents' perceptions, misperceptions were higher for African American than Caucasian parents at baseline; yet, African American parents also showed the greatest improvement in accuracy upon follow‐up .…”

My Weight Ruler: A simple and effective tool to enhance parental understanding of child weight status

“…But parents and pediatricians often underestimate children's body size (Akerman et al, 2007;Chaimovitz et al, 2008;Jones et al, 2011;Lampard et al, 2008;Parry et al, 2008;Perrin et al, 2005;Spurrier et al, 2006;Tschamler et al, 2010;Wald et al, 2007). Unrecognized obesity is especially high for obese parents, for overweight as compared to obese children (Taveras et al, 2011), for lower socioeconomic parents (Rivera-Soto and Rodriguez-Figueroa, 2012) and for Hispanics (Intagliata et al, 2008), African Americans (West et al, 2008) and Native Americans (Arcan et al, 2012) and could impair parental motivation to adopt weight control measures (Vuorela et al, 2010) and to participate in obesity reduction programs (Taveras et al, 2011).…”

Association between inaccurate estimation of body size and obesity in schoolchildren

“…However, it appears that the prevalence of inaccuracy is high in comparison to studies that have surveyed schoolchildren of different age groups and using other assessment tools, in which reported prevalence rates range from 22.6% to 58.0%. 4,22,[31][32][33][34] It is important to stress that the questionnaires used as evaluation instruments in these studies have not been validated for this use and so the discrepancies between prevalence results may be related to greater sensitivity of the instrument used in the present study. Notwithstanding these methodological differences, it is necessary to carry out studies to evaluate whether The present study revealed a greater chance of body underestimation among both boys and girls with obesity according to BMI, and a greater chance of body overestimation among girls with central obesity.…”