Parental optimism about childhood obesity-related disease risks

Objectives: Most parents believe childhood obesity is a problem for society, but not for their own children. We sought to understand whether parents’ risk assessment was skewed by optimism, the tendency to overestimate one’s chances of experiencing positive events. Methods: We administered a nationa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International Journal of Obesity 2017-10, Vol.41 (10), p.1467-1472
Main Authors: Wright, D R, Lozano, P, Dawson-Hahn, E, Christakis, D A, Haaland, W L, Basu, A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
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Analysis
Body weight
Cardiovascular diseases
Child
Childhood
Childhood obesity
Children
Children & youth
Comorbidity
Coronary artery disease
Demographics
Depression - epidemiology
Diabetes mellitus
Diabetes mellitus (non-insulin dependent)
Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 - epidemiology
Educational Status
Epidemiology
Female
Health aspects
Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice
Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
Health risks
Health Surveys
Heart diseases
Heart Diseases - epidemiology
Humans
Hypertension
Internal Medicine
Male
Medicine
Medicine & Public Health
Mental depression
Metabolic Diseases
Obesity
Obesity in children
Optimism
Optimism - psychology
original-article
Overweight
Parents
Parents & parenting
Parents - education
Parents - psychology
Pediatric Obesity - epidemiology
Pediatric Obesity - psychology
Perception
Predictive control
Psychological aspects
Public Health
Regression analysis
Regression models
Risk Assessment
Risk Factors
Risk perception
Socioeconomic Factors
Surveys
Type 2 diabetes
United States
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Summary:Objectives: Most parents believe childhood obesity is a problem for society, but not for their own children. We sought to understand whether parents’ risk assessment was skewed by optimism, the tendency to overestimate one’s chances of experiencing positive events. Methods: We administered a national web-based survey to 502 parents of 5–12-year-old children. Parents reported the chances that (a) their child and (b) ‘a typical child in their community’ would be overweight or obese, and develop hypertension, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and depression in adulthood. Respondents self-reported demographic and health information, and we obtained demographic and health information about the typical child using zip code-level census and lifestyle data. We used regression models with fixed effects to evaluate whether optimism bias was present in parent predictions of children’s future health outcomes. Results: Parents had 40 times lower adjusted odds (OR=0.025, P
ISSN:0307-0565
1476-5497
DOI:10.1038/ijo.2017.103