London: Have you been nagging your kids about their increasing weight throughout their childhood? Well, this was probably a wrong move on your part.
A new study has revealed that parents need to abstain from perceiving their children as overweight, since it can raise the chances of them gaining weight as they grow older.
Thinking that the constant nagging will motivate them to lose weight and adopt a healthy lifestyle probably won't work, it seems.
Children whose parents identify them as being overweight perceived their own body size more negatively and were more likely to attempt to lose weight – factors that partly accounted for their weight gain, the researchers said.
“When a parent identifies a child as being overweight, that child is at increased risk of future weight gain,” Eric Robinson, psychology researcher at University of Liverpool in Britain.
The findings showed that parents’ perceptions were associated with children’s weight gain 10 years later. Children whose parents considered them to be overweight at age four or five tended to gain more weight by age 14 or 15.
The results were the same for boys and girls and they could not be explained by other possible factors, such as household income, presence of a medical condition, and parents’ weight.
“The study argues that the stigma attached to being an overweight child may explain why children whose parents view them as being overweight tend to have elevated weight gain during development,” added another researcher Angelina Sutin from Florida State University, in the US.
For the study, the team examined data from 2,823 Australian families as well as from 5,886 Irish families, where the parents were asked if they viewed their children as underweight, normal weight, overweight, or very overweight.
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science.
(With IANS inputs)
