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Moms desperate to keep their children healthy may have another variable to juggle in their battle against obesity. A new study reports that demanding mothers are more likely to raise overweight children than mothers with a more balanced parenting style. The study found that children with authoritarian parents were five times more likely to become overweight in first grade than children with demanding yet nurturing parents.
Previous research focused on specific parenting behaviors (i.e. what parents feed their children and how much physical activity they encourage) and how those behaviors affect a child’s weight. This study considers parenting styles and how certain styles may increase the likelihood that a child will become overweight.
“Parenting style may have a greater impact on shaping daily activities, eating behavior, emotional function, and ultimately overweight risk of children than selected parenting or feeding practices alone,” the report stated.
No one understands why stricter more regimented parenting leads to higher rates of obesity in children, said Dr. Kay Rhee, one of the study’s lead researchers and a pediatrician at Boston University’s School of Medicine. However, she said strict parenting might take away from a child’s ability to self-regulate.
In contrast, Rhee said a more authoritative parenting style, one that sets clear boundaries and expectations, yet is tempered with flexibility and makes allowances for a child’s individuality, may help a child develop self-responsibility and the ability to make his or her own decisions. For example, a more self-directed child might be more inclined to correctly respond to his body’s internal cues. A child dependent upon external directives, however, may continue to consume food despite internal cues to stop.
The journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Pediatrics, published the study results in the June issue.
Rhee and colleagues analyzed data for 872 children who participated in an ongoing National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Almost 90% of the children in study were Caucasian. The research team focused on data gathered when the children were 4.5 years, then again when they were in first grade.
The four parenting styles referred to in the report were based upon U.C. Berkeley research psychologist, Diana Baumrind’s descriptions of variations in parental attempts to control and socialize their children. The four styles—authoritarian, authoritative, permissive and neglectful –primarily reflect the parent’s level of sensitivity to a child’s needs and expectations for self-control from the child.
“The findings can help parents step back and reflect upon their own parenting styles and examine how what they’re doing might have a greater impact than they’d realized,” Rhee said.
However, she concedes that the four parenting styles used for this study are not universally applicable across cultures nor are the study’s findings. They function differently and may have divergent impacts on children’s behaviors within other cultural or ethnic contexts.
“Given the limitations of the study, I think that these patterns and their implications for overweight risk apply to white Caucasian families,” she said. “What effects these same patterns have in African American and Hispanic families remains to be seen.”
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