More parents think their overweight child is 'about right'

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More parents think their overweight child is 'about right'

By Kathryn Doyle NEW YORK (Reuters Health) â€" Between 1988 and 2010, the number of parents who could correctly identify their children as overweight or obese went down, according to a new study. “Today, almost one out of every three kids is overweight or obese,” said senior author Dr. Jian Zhang of the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. Zhang and his team examined height and weight data on 2,871 children, ages six to 11, from the 1988 to 1994 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and 3,202 similar kids from the 2005 to 2010 cycles of the survey. In all cases, the children’s parents were asked if they considered their child ‘overweight, underweight, just about the right weight, or don’t know.’ In the 1988 to 1994 data set, 78 percent of parents of an overweight boy and 61 percent of parents of an overweight girl, identified the child as ‘about the right weight.’ That number increased to 83 percent for boys and 78 percent for girls in the 2005 to 2010 period.

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