We at Evergreen know the benefits of parents being more involved in their children’s lives, but one new study suggests that how parents talk to their children about weight loss and weight gain affects how much the children lose.
“The study at Brown University divided adolescents into two groups, with one group containing parents who were heavily communicating with their children about the selected weight loss program and the other group maintaining little communication between parents and children regarding their weight loss.”
The researchers found that styles of communication, rather than the amount of communication, had the best results, said Mary Beth McCullough, a clinical psychology intern at the University.
“The study, published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, was 16 weeks long, and the children would meet with the researchers for an hour every week, Jelalian said. In the group with less parental involvement, the researchers only met with the parents before and after the study, she added.”
“In the increased parental involvement group, “parents were asked to set their own goals regarding to weight,” Jelalian said. “Sometimes parents weren’t following guidelines,” she noted, adding that this in turn led to children not wanting to follow the rules to lose weight either.”
