Dads can help beat the bulge
Fathers largely excluded from family-based efforts to prevent childhood obesity, study finds
Fathers play a key role in influencing their child’s diet, physical activity and screen time, yet they are rarely targeted in family-based efforts to prevent childhood obesity, according to a recent study that should serve as a “wake-up call.”
“This idea that mothers are the primary caretakers and gatekeepers is really antiquated,” says Jess Haines, an associate professor of applied nutrition at the University of Guelph and co-author of the study, called The Forgotten Parent, published February in the journal Preventive Medicine.
“We really need to be — in our public health messaging, health policies, and our prenatal programs — thinking of making sure that we engage the whole family, rather than just the mother. It’s more inclusive and represents what family looks like today.”
Haines, along with colleagues from the University of Arizona and Harvard University, analyzed studies from around the world that looked at familybased interventions to prevent childhood obesity. Those are studies in which researchers help parents change beha- viours within their family by doing things such as reducing screen time and improving diet, physical activity and sleep.
They looked at 85 studies, done between 2008 and 2015. In total there were about14,900 parents recruited to participate — but it’s estimated that just around 900, or 6 per cent, were fathers. The analysis revealed that researchers tend to target mothers, and engage them, in family-based interventions to prevent childhood obesity. When fathers were included they tended to be dads of elementary-school aged children, but they were largely excluded from prenatal interventions or if they had infants.
“This is a wake-up call for us to figure out how to do this better,” says Haines, adding dads should be included because they play an important role in helping children establish healthy behaviours.
“It’s not the dads’ fault. There just aren’t efforts to make sure we’re engaging them... We anticipate that engaging fathers earlier in these interventions will result in improved out- comes for their kids.”
Family interventions are more effective when they include both parents, says the study’s lead author, Kirsten Davison from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“If fathers are largely missing from childhood obesity interventions, we are compromising our ability to improve children’s weight outcomes.”
Pediatrician Dr. Tom Warshawski, who’s also chair of the Vancouver-based Childhood Obesity Foundation, says that just because fathers don’t participate in intervention programs and studies, doesn’t mean they’re not making important behaviour changes in the home.
“It’s difficult for both parents to make that time commitment over the length of a program,” says Warshawski, who wasn’t involved in the study. “But when both parents are partici- pating in the changes that’s the most important thing.”
The key to success is having family buy-in, engagement and behaviour change, he says, noting “The whole food environment has to change.”
The study, comes at a time when childhood obesity rates are on the rise in Canada and around the world.
In the last three decades — as more and more junk food and processed food has entered the food system — obesity rates in children and youth have nearly tripled in Canada, with one in four being overweight or obese, according to national figures. But Warshawski says the trend is reversible, at an individual level. He recommends minimizing one’s intake of added sugars, refined flours and processed foods, eating more vegetables and whole grains, and cooking and eating at home.