Parental Perception of Child Bodyweight and Health Among Mexican-American Children with Acanthosis Nigricans

Abstract

Acanthosis nigricans (AN) is a cutaneous marker associated with elevated risk of type 2 diabetes. This study assesses mother-father differences in perception of child's bodyweight and health by Mexican-American parents with AN-positive children. The study used medical records in conjunction with survey data collected between 2011 and 2012 for 309 Mexican-American children with AN in South Texas. Multivariate logit models were estimated to assess mother-father differences in perception of child bodyweight and health controlling for selected child- and parent-level covariates. About 91 % of the children in the sample were obese and 6.5 % were overweight. One fifth of mothers and 38.5 % of fathers in the sample expressed no concern of their children's bodyweight. After adjusting for selected explanatory variables at both the child and parent level, the odds for fathers, relative to mothers, to be concerned about child's bodyweight were 82 % lower (OR = 0.18, p < 0.05). Similar findings also hold for parental awareness of child's AN (OR = 0.19, p < 0.05). Among Mexican-American families with AN-positive children, the lack of concern over child's bodyweight, unawareness of AN, and misconception of child's health on the part of many parents, especially of fathers, constitutes a challenge to diabetes prevention. Health education programs targeting Mexican-American families with AN-positive children might be more cost effective to consider mother-father differences in perception of child health and bodyweight.

Father’s roles and perspectives on healthcare seeking for children with pneumonia: findings of a qualitative study in a rural community of the Philippines

“…Considering their important role in the decision-making process, it is necessary to offer health education programmes to increase fathers’ knowledge and make the healthcare system more trustworthy to fathers. 52 53 …”

Growing Healthy Together: protocol for a randomized clinical trial using parent mentors for early childhood obesity intervention in a Latino community

“…Particularly in preschool-age children, parents underestimate their child’s weight or simply do not think it possible that their child could have obesity or be at an unhealthy weight [38, 39]. Therefore, a stages-of-change questionnaire that has been evaluated as compared with reported parental practice in diet and physical activity domains [40] is administered to parents to better understand how their participation in the trial and any changes in their child’s weight over time may be associated with differences in motivation.…”

Mexican American Parental Knowledge and Perceptions of Childhood Obesity: An Integrative Review

“…The term "oblivobesity" (Katz, 2015) refers to a difficulty in identifying excess weight in their child due to a change in what is perceived as the norm for healthy weight, based on the national average weight and physical appearance of a child. Fathers were found to underestimate their child's weight to a greater extent (Kersey et al, 2010;Pasch et al, 2016;Su et al, 2014). The level of misperception was substantial for all eight studies in which at least 50% of participants underestimated their child's weight, including binational studies (Guendelman et al, 2010;Rosas et al, 2010).…”

“…All seven quantitative studies were methodologically strong using validated tools. Five studies had large sample sizes ranging from 309 to 609 subjects (Kersey, Lipton, Quinn, & Lantos, 2010;Pasch et al, 2016;Rosas et al, 2010;Sadeghi et al, 2017;Su et al, 2014). Only two studies used theoretical frameworks (Bayles, 2010;Kersey et al, 2010).…”

“…A common theme among studies (8 out of 12) was parental underestimation of child weight and size (Bayles, 2010;Guendelman et al, 2010;Kersey et al, 2010;McLeod, Bates, Heard, Bohnert, & Santiago, 2018;Pasch et al, 2016;Rosas et al, 2010;Sadeghi et al, 2017;Su et al, 2014). Studies used terms such as parental underestimation, parental misperceptions, and parental "oblivobesity" (McLeod et al, 2018).…”