A new study has found that parents could be impacting negatively on their child’s weight.
KSL.com reports that researchers found that young kids whose parents viewed them as overweight gained more weight by their teenage years than those whose parents thought they were a normal weight or underweight.
For the experiment, experts looked at the BMIs of more than 3,500 children from Australia aged 4 or 5. They also asked the parents if they thought their child was underweight, normal weight or overweight.
The team then recorded the child’s BMI every year until the age of 13 and the conclusion was that the kids of the parents who (rightly or wrongly) perceived them as overweight ended up gaining more weight over the years.
It is believed that the reason for this could be that the parents limited their child’s food intake as a result of their belief, causing them to rebel by eating more.
Another theory put forth by Angelina R. Sutin, who led the experiment, was that the parents shamed their children which could have led to overeating.
These theories could not be tested by the data of the study, which was
published in the Pediatrics journal.
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