Weight Concerns and Weight Control Behaviors of Adolescents and Their Mothers

Abstract

Among adolescents, an accurate perception that weight status is important to their mother is associated with thinking frequently about wanting to be thinner and about frequent dieting.

Factors associated with weight loss dieting among adolescents: the 11-year follow-up of the 1993 Pelotas (Brazil) birth cohort study

“…This finding is consistent with a study by Field et al 14 analyzing American adolescents 12 to 18 years of age, with 8% and 3% prevalence rates for dieting in the previous year by girls and boys, respectively. Calderon et al 15 evaluated adolescents from 13 to 17 years of age in public schools in Los Angeles, California, and found similar results (dieting was more prevalent in girls than boys).…”

“…Calderon et al 15 evaluated adolescents from 13 to 17 years of age in public schools in Los Angeles, California, and found similar results (dieting was more prevalent in girls than boys). This different behavior between girls and boys appears to be well documented in the literature and may reflect a greater concern among girls, particularly in relation to appearance and health, as compared to their male peers 14,15,16,17 .…”

“…Perhaps the stronger identification of teenage girls with their mothers plus the mother's concern over not reproducing her own unwanted physical appearance may be influencing the decision by girls to engage in weight loss dieting, since the study showed that daughters of obese mothers were more inclined to diet. Adolescents whose mothers considered their weight important wanted to be thinner and dieted more often 14 .…”

Mother–Daughter Relationship Quality and Body Image in Preadolescent Girls

“…Based on the idea that family relationship characteristics are likely a salient predictor of body image for preadolescent girls (Byely et al 2000), we expected that higher quality mother-daughter relationships, as rated by daughters, would be associated with healthier child body image (lower body dissatisfaction, higher body esteem). Generally following findings which suggest that daughters', but not mothers', perceptions of the mother-daughter relationship predict daughter body image (Field et al 2005), we expected that maternal rating of relationship quality would be unrelated to child body image. Although we did not expect the maternal perception of the quality of the relationship to be related to child body image, we believed that the measurement of maternal perception was necessary in order to rule out that association and thereby replicate an important previous finding.…”

“…Although media and peer-level influences appear to be of primary importance in predicting body image in female adolescent samples, family influences, and maternal influences in particular, have long been presupposed to be a key determinant of preadolescent girls' body image development (Field et al 2005; see review, Smolak and Levine 2001). This notion has even been the subject of recent media attention, with two widely promoted mass audience texts describing how mothers transmit beliefs regarding beauty standards and influence their daughters' weight-related behaviors (e.g., Chadwick 2009;Fuerstein 2009).…”