Parent education helps young kids lose weight

NEW YORK, Mar 7 (Reuters) Giving parents the skills to cope effectively with their young children's weight problems can make it easier for these kids to slim down, a study from Australia shows.

Forty-five per cent of children whose parents received skills training, along with intensive lifestyle interventions, experienced a significant drop in their body mass index (BMI) after one year, compared to 24 per cent of those who received the lifestyle interventions alone and 19 per cent of those who received no intervention.

''Parenting-skills training combined with promoting a healthy family lifestyle may be an effective approach to weight management in prepubertal children, particularly boys,'' Dr Rebecca K Golley of Flinders University in Adelaide and colleagues write in the journal Pediatrics.

While parents may have the knowledge necessary to help promote a healthier lifestyle for their children, they may not have the skills to help them adopt and stick to these healthier behaviors, the authors note.

To see whether giving parents these skills might help their kids lose weight, the researchers randomly assigned families of 111 overweight children, 6 to 9 years old, to a parenting skills training program, skills training plus intensive lifestyle intervention, or a control group who received no intervention.

The parental skills training program consisted of four weekly two-hour group sessions followed by seven individual telephone sessions. In the lifestyle intervention program, parents took part in seven group sessions including information on healthy eating, reading food labels, promoting exercise, and more, while the children participated in supervised play sessions.

Twelve months later, children whose parents received both skills training and the lifestyle intervention showed a roughly 10 per cent reduction in their body weight, compared to 5 per cent for kids in the lifestyle intervention-only group and the wait listing group.

Average waist circumference score fell for both intervention groups, but not for the control group. The effect of both interventions was more powerful for girls than boys.

The significant weight loss seen in the control group makes it more difficult to generalize the findings to other settings, the researchers note; ''however, in the current obesity epidemic environment and associated media coverage, such bias may be difficult to avoid.'' Reuters SY DB0958