Parenting strategies for healthy weight in childhood

This chapter describes obesity prevention strategies and concepts. It specifically focuses on parenting practices for the establishment of healthy dietary patterns, eating habits and food preferences that are conducive to achieving healthy weight status throughout the lifecycle, and considers cultural, societal and environmental influences. Parents are the main influence on a child's dietary intake until the child goes to school. While parents continue to exert influences beyond this critical early childhood period, peers and significant others become increasingly influential. Quantitative studies that have considered relationships between children's food choices and various environmental factors have consistently shown that risk factors for poor childhood nutrition include poor maternal nutrition knowledge, parental television viewing, authoritarian or permissive parenting styles and role modelling of energy-dense, nutrient-poor food consumption. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the influence of parents on family eating styles, food and physical activity habits and sedentary behaviours