Parenting style may be causing obesity in kids, Canadian researchers say. Here is how!
Level: B2 and above
What you can practice: Reading comprehension, Vocabulary building
Your parenting style may be causing your child’s obesity (=being fat, overweight)
A Canadian study suggests certain approaches (= style, method) to parenting may increase (=make larger) risk of obesity in kids
Genetics, poverty and limited access to healthy foods (= not enough opportunities to eat healthy) have long been known to affect (=have an effect on) a child’s risk of obesity. But a new study suggests parenting style could have an impact (=effect) too.The nationwide Canadian study suggests a link between parenting style and obesity risk in kids, with certain styles upping (=making bigger) the risk. The research, published in Preventive Medicine, is based on a Statistics Canada national survey of more than 37,000 Canadian youth from 1994 to 2008.The study uses a decades-old framework for parenting styles, which divides them into four main groups:
- Authoritarian: Parents who are demanding (= strict, hard on the kids) but not responsive (= paying attention to the kids’ needs).
- Authoritative: Parents who are demanding but responsive to their children.
- Permissive: Parents who are responsive but not demanding.
- Negligent: Parents who are neither responsive nor demanding.
The results showed that, for the population as a whole, preschool and school-aged kids with “authoritarian” parents were between 35 and 41 per cent more likely to be obese (=fat, overweight) than those with “authoritative” parents.
“Kids are kind of born with this innate ability to self-monitor their eating, though there are always extremes like Halloween. But an “authoritarian” parenting style can override that instinctive (=spontaneous, intuitive) self-monitoring, she said,” said Lisa Kakinami, an assistant professor in Concordia’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
Read the full story in The Toronto Star
Image credit: The Toronto Star
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