Parents can influence disordered eating

Abstract

Welcome to Public Health Moment from the University of Minnesota. When parents make comments or tease their children about their weight, it may lead their children to engage in disordered eating -- such as binge eating and extreme weight control behaviors, including the use of diet pills or skipping meals. That’s according to research involving 365 adolescent girls. The study was led by University of Minnesota professor Dianne Neumark-Sztainer. <Neumark-Sztainer: “We found in our study that nearly half of the mothers encouraged the girls to diet. And about 60 percent of the girls reported that there was some sort of weight teasing going on in the home.”>. Neumark-Sztainer emphasized that the findings should not be used to blame parents, most of whom were trying to help their children. <Neumark-Sztainer: “Now, many of the weight comments made by parents were no doubt done because parents wanted to help their girls to have a healthy weight. Parents need to find other ways to help their children. The advice, based on our study, is to resist the temptation to talk about weight. Rather, we need to find ways to help our children to make healthy eating and physical activity behaviors by making it easier to engage in those behaviors at home, by talking about the implementation of behaviors that can be continued over a long time – and really staying away from short-term dieting.”> For Public Health Moment, I’m Mark Engebretson.