Understanding parent concerns about children's diet, activity and weight status: an important step towards effective obesity prevention interventions

Objective: To identify parents' concerns and attitudes towards children's diets, activity habits and weight status. Design: Computer-assisted telephone interviewing administration of a 37-item survey. Data were weighted for parental education level. Descriptive results are presented, and comparisons are made by the age, gender and parental characteristics of the child. Setting: Online research panel of Australian parents. Subjects: A total of 1202 randomly selected parents of children aged 2-16 years, broadly representative of the Australian population. Results: Parents were concerned about their child's education (reported by 35% of respondents), child's health and well-being (25%), and violence, drugs and alcohol (20%). Concern about nutrition was indicated by 14% of respondents and concern about fitness/exercise was indicated by 3% of the sample. Factors perceived as making a healthy diet difficult to achieve for their child were child resistance (89%), the availability of healthy food (72%), a busy lifestyle (67%) and the influence of food advertising (63%). Ninety-two per cent of parents thought that it was realistic for their child to be active for at least 1 h/d, with 75% of parents feeling that it was realistic for their child to have less than 2 h recreational screen time per d. Despite this, common barriers to achieving the activity guidelines were lack of time, weather and keeping children occupied. Conclusions: Insights into parental concerns from the current study may be useful in guiding development of interventions to improve children's nutrition and physical activity habits by framing messages in a way that are most likely to resonate with parents.