Obesity: Obesity and Children Essay

Submitted By sarasarin
Words: 740
Pages: 3

Childhood Obesity: Role of Parents

A. Literature Review
1. Parent’s Responsibilities:
Parents are decision makers for their children’s nutrition and activity. Parents make eating choices, keep an eye on their sedentary behaviors, and connect children in physical and social activities. Parents are responsible for the behavior and health of their children. They have a strong influence over children’s habits, behaviors, physical activity and essentially over what they eat mainly in early age. The decisions that parents make about the family’s lifestyle affect their child’s current and future mental and physical health. [1] (Holm et al.,2008). According to Anzman et al. (2010), “In early period of children’s life parents have a high degree of control over children’s environments and experiences.” This can be resulted in good or bed effects on children’s behavior and life stayle.
Fraser et al., 2011, recommend that factors that interact with child obesity, are location, environment, parenting style, culture, knowledge and life style

According to Fogelholm et al (1999), he conclude in his studies that parents overweight was a strong predictor of child obesity and this association become more evident when obesity is find in both father and mother.
Parents have to encourage their children to be physically active, take part in different sports and much more. They can also spend time with their children in physical activity or some sport. This will encourage children more and this is good for both parents and children’s mental and physical health. To deal with these issues parents have to bring awareness about bad food habits, advantages of good nutritional diet, problems regarding to obesity. Childhood Obesity:
The American Heritage Dictionary formally defines obesity as condition of increased body weight, caused by an excessive increase of fat. Increase in high fat foods and low physical activity is very common reason to be overweight or obese in today’s society. [3] Obesity is a increasing problem in U.S. children. In 1994, one in five children between the ages of 6 and 17 was overweight. This is double the rate of 30 years ago (National Center for Health Statistics, 1999).
During growth, number of fat cells increases but when energy intake exceeds expenditure, size of fat cells increase. When fat cells have reached their maximum size and energy intake continues to exceed energy expenditure, fat cells increase in number again. But When fat loss occurs, fat cells decrease in size only not in number(Whitney & Rolfes, 2002). Research has shown that obesity is also associated with increase in levels of a leptin (Moran et al., 2003). In children, obesity is the most common metabolic and nutritional disease. A study done by Tremblay et al. (2000) showed that there was a 17% increase in obesity rates among boys and a 15% increase among girls, since 1981 to 1996.[3]
According to Dr. Peter Nieman, (2004) a practicing pediatrician, has recognized three main causes of childhood