Kids More Likely to Gain Weight When Parents Perceive their Kids to Be Overweight

According to new study when parents consider their kids are overweight, that may put the kid at higher chance of gaining more weight.

The researched checked more than 3,500 Australian children and discovered that those who were overweight when they were 4 or 5 years old, and whose parents think them as overweight, gained much more weight by their 13th birthday. This added gain is in comparison to children who were overweight, but whose parents considered they were in reality normal weight or underweight.

"In this case, misperception may be protective," said Angelina R. Sutin, who led the research published Thursday in the journal Pediatrics.

“Generally, parents of healthy weight kids in this study assessed their weight status accurately,” said co-author Dr. Eric Robinson of the University of Liverpool in the U.K.

Beginning of the study, 75% of kids were average weight for their height. About 20 percent were overweight, while approximately 5 percent were underweight.

80% of overweight children at age 4 or 5 were seen as normal weight by their parents, the researchers report in the journal Pediatrics.

Approximately one in five overweight kids whose parents saw them as obese, their chances of gaining more weight relative to their height by the end of the study were much higher than if their parents didn’t perceive them as overweight at the start.

Limitation of the study can be is that it relied merely on weight and height measurements to check whether children were at a healthy weight, the authors said.

"Parents should talk to their children about what it means to be healthy, rather than focusing specifically on weight," Sutin recommended.

Since how parents see their children's overweight issue is linked to future weight gain in the study, parents and other family caregivers may require to monitor how they interact with overweight children to make sure they don't make the issue worse, said Jerica Berge, a researcher at the University of Minnesota who wasn't involved in the study.

"Parents who perceive their child as overweight may also engage in weight conversations with their child, such as telling their child that they are fat and need to lose weight," Berge said by email with Fox News.

The research was published Thursday in the journal Pediatrics with the title " Parental Perception of Weight Status and Weight Gain Across Childhood ".