Oblivobesity: Looking Over the Overweight That Parents Keep Overlooking

Arecent study reported in the British Journal of General Practice examined the correspondence, or more aptly the lack thereof, between the BMI of nearly 3000 children and parental perception of weight status.¹ Parents tended to recognize children as overweight only when they were above the 99.7th population percentile; the official cut point is set at the 85th percentile. Translating this into raw numbers, nearly one of three parents underestimated the weight status of their children. From the parental perspective, only 4 of 2976 children in the cohort were very overweight (i.e., BMI above the standardized 95th percentile). Objectively, that number was 369.

Invited to do so by the BBC,² the researchers speculated that the excess weight of a given child was hard to spot against a rising population mean. In other words, as the average weight of children in the UK rises, what every parent considers normal seems to rise with it.

This is by no means the first time we have heard about prevalent, at least relative, parental obliviousness to obesity in children. The tendency has been reported in New Zealand,³ Native Americans,⁴ the general population in the United States,⁵ Australia,⁶ Belgium,⁷ Ireland,⁸ and Pacific Islanders,⁹ at least. With a global footprint, the predilection may warrant a name all its own: oblivobesity.

Parental obliviousness bedevils our responses to rampant childhood obesity in ways that are largely self-evident. Whether or not knowledge is reliably power,¹⁰ denial and delusion are reliably disempowering. We do not always fix what we know to be broken, but we virtually never fix what we are overlooking--whether at the personal level or that of our culture. Climate change and its consequences, such as drought, illustrate this all too well. As long as the problem could be denied, few, if any, societal resources were directed to solutions. With regard to health, the best examples of costly denial are perhaps alcoholism and addiction, where acknowledgment of the problem is uniformly recognized as the first part of the solution.

But the pursuit of objective information to supplant parental misperception is controversial. When Mike Huckabee, as governor...