Every cockroach is beautilful to the eyes of his mother? Parent’s perception of child’s BMI

Abstract

Abstract Background Childhood obesity is becoming a social health problem in the western world and an important goal is to analyze and correct risk factors. Part of the problem could be determined by a different perception of the weight. We aim to determine the association between children's BMI and the parent's perception of their Health Status. Methods In October 2019 we conduced a cross sectional study in which a questionaire was administrated to the parents of primary and secondary schools children in South-East Tuscany, Italy. Eating habits, lifestyle and biometric data were collected from children and their parents. 4324 persons were included. We used Stata for descriptive and inferential analysis. Cohen's Kappa was used to find the correlation between variables. Results Analysis was carried out on 1421 complete questionnaires. We found that most of parents have a wrong perception of weight's children. 88.3% of parents who have obese children belive that his child is normal weight or only “a little overweight” and only 11.7% have a perception of their child's obesity. 67.6% of parents who have overweight children, belive that their child is normal weight. While among underweight children, 74.3% of parents belive that their child is normal weight. Cohen's kappa show poor agreement between real and perceived BMI (K = 0.26; p = 0.0001). Conclusions Our results show, among the overweight children, there is a misperception in the weight of the child by the parents, uniformly with the data present in the literature. Acquisition of healty behavior during childhood is extremely important for the state of health in adulthood and for avoiding the onset of associated diseases. Therefore, food education becomes a crucial objective for the future of our country: an essential goal is to create prevention programs addressed to children and parents to increase consciousness of the correct weight and the diseases that can result from bad nutrition. Key messages Many parents have a misperception of the weight of their children. It is crucial to educate parents to control their children's weight to avoid the onset of metabolic diseases. Increase consciousness in children and parents of the correct weight should become extremely important to avoid the onset of disease in adulthood.