Does Blaming Parents for Childhood Obesity Interfere with Policies to Address the Problem?

The American public holds parents highly responsible and largely to blame for childhood obesity, according to a new study published in The Milbank Quarterly. How do these publicly held views influence efforts to reverse obesity rates? While much of the literature suggests that negative public attitudes towards obese individuals could have a detrimental effect on efforts to reduce obesity, this study found that even among those believing that parents were mostly to blame for childhood obesity, there was support for broad policy actions, particularly school-based obesity prevention policies. The study, “The Role of Parents in Public Views of Strategies to Address Childhood Obesity in the United States,” focuses on how public attitudes toward the role of parents in the obesity epidemic might influence support for a range of obesity reduction strategies. The authors are Julia A. Wolfson, MPP, and Colleen L. Barry, PhD, MPP (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), Sarah E. Gollust, PhD (University of Minnesota), and Jeff Niederdeppe, PhD (Cornell University).