Challenges encountered by parents from urban, lower social economic class in changing lifestyle behaviors of their children who are overweight or obese.

BACKGROUND: Parents from urban, lower social economic classes often encounter unique challenges in their lives, which shape how they work with their children who are overweight or obese to change their exercise and eating behaviors at home. The present study took an initial step to address a gap in the literature by describing the challenges that parents from lower social economic classes in an urban city encountered in changing exercise and eating behaviors of their children who are overweight or obese. METHODS: A conversational style semi-structured interview with prompts and probes was conducted to 44 parents whose child is overweight or obese. Inductive content analysis and constant comparison was used to analyze the data. Data trustworthiness was established by using a variety of strategies. RESULTS: Two major themes with eight sub-themes emerged from the data: Challenges to promote a healthy active lifestyle, and challenges from their child's development and lifestyle behavior. Eight sub-themes were: (1) Need for effective strategies for a lifestyle behavior change, (2) monitor and promote healthy choices, (3) money, time, and dangerous neighborhood, (4) scientific knowledge to promote a healthy active lifestyle, (5) developmental changes of adolescence, (6) unmotivated and lack of persistence, (7) sneaking eating, and (8) peer pressure. CONCLUSION: The challenges, from economic to parenting, are certainly of importance, and understanding these challenges will be crucial to help school-based professionals develop interventions. Those identified challenges should be clearly placed within family-school collaboration practices.

Types and Nature of Parental Support for Overweight Students to Cope With Weight-Related Teasing.

BACKGROUND: Parental support can protect adolescents from various forms of bullying. There is a lack of in-depth information about what social support parents provide to overweight adolescents when they are teased at school. In this study, we took an initial step to address this gap in the literature by describing the types and nature of support that parents provided to their overweight child when they were teased. METHODS: A conversational style semistructured interview/prompts and probes were conducted with 28 volunteering parents. Inductive content analysis was used to analyze the data. Data trustworthiness was established through a variety of strategies. RESULTS: Six themes emerged from the data: (1) having conversations, being encouraging, and "being supportive"; (2) using religion to teach self-acceptance and comfort their child; (3) offering advice on how to cope with the teasing; (4) fostering their child's self-esteem; (5) teaching reality and acceptance of criticism in early life; and (6) seeking support from other parents or professionals. CONCLUSIONS: Parents offered multiple supports for their child when they were teased. This information can facilitate the development of effective family-based interventions on coping with teasing among overweight students. Future research is also needed to examine the effectiveness of the recommended interventions.

Adolescents' perceptions of controllability and its relationship to explicit obesity bias.

BACKGROUND: The purpose of the study was to assess adolescents' perceptions of controllability and its relation to weight stereotypes as a function of gender. METHODS: Two hundred and thirty-one seventh and eighth graders from physical education classes completed a perception of controllability questionnaire and weight stereotype explicit scale ratings. RESULTS: Analysis of variance and chi-square analyses indicated that adolescents had high perceptions of controllability, namely the perception that one can control one's weight with diet and exercise. Perceptions of controllability were weakly associated with the endorsement of stereotypes toward the overweight. Results from chi-square analysis on individual statements related to causality of obesity indicated that participants may not have a complete understanding or be receiving appropriate messages about the etiology of obesity. Also, 2-way chi-square analyses indicated that boys more frequently believed in personal control than girls, and girls indicated more frequently that they were unsure whether obesity was children's fault. CONCLUSION: Teachers need to be cognizant of the messages that are relayed to students about the etiology of obesity if they are looking to positively impact students' healthy lifestyle behaviors and personal and social responsibility. Also, populations (eg, gender) may need to be considered when delivering these messages.

A service learning based project to change implicit and explicit bias toward obese individuals in kinesiology pre-professionals.

BACKGROUND: The objective of the study was to assess the efficacy of a multi-component intervention to reduce kinesiology pre-professionals' implicit and explicit bias. METHOD: A pre-post experimental design, which consisted of an experimental group (n = 42) and a control group (n = 36), was conducted to assess the efficacy of the intervention using both implicit and explicit obesity bias measures. RESULTS: On the pre-test, participants did not display overall explicit bias on the Anti-Fat Attitudes Test (AFAT) but had strong implicit bias and bias on the lazy/motivated semantic differential scale. Participation in the intervention reduced explicit bias on the AFAT social character disparagement and weight control/blame subscales but not implicit bias. CONCLUSION: Implicit bias remains difficult to change and appears to be deep-seated in individuals' minds. Future interventions may need methods to make sure all participants process and connect emotionally to all information.