Parents shouldn’t take all the blame for kids’ weight issues, says study

When it comes to childhood obesity, parents are often the first to be blamed.

But a child's natural weight could play a bigger role than we might think as it may influence their parents' attitudes towards feeding them. Parents tend feed the child more if he or she is genetically predisposed to a lower weight, a new study has found. Researchers at King’s College London and University College London looked at data for 4,500 twins born in England and Wales between 1994 and 1996. Using answers from the Child Feeding Questionnaire, they calculated whether the children were predisposed to have a higher or lower weight and compared this to how their parents fed them. "We found that parents whose children were genetically predisposed to have a lower weight were more pressuring of them to eat, and those parents whose children were genetically predisposed to have a higher weight were more restrictive over how much and what they were allowed to eat," Saskia Selzam, from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, told The Independent. "Our findings suggest that parents develop their feeding practices in response to their child’s natural tendency towards a higher or lower weight. “The way a parent feeds their child may also influence their child’s weight to some extent, but our results challenge the prevailing view that parental behaviour is the major influence on childhood obesity."