Parenting Educational Styles and Obesity Association in Mexican Children

Introduction Obesity can develop from childhood through adulthood and is influenced by genetics, family, and environmental factors. Parenting educational style is believed to contribute to an individual's future weight status. This study aims to assess the connection between parenting educational style and weight-related issues. Methods The study involved 487 participants, including either the mother and/or father and their school-age child, aged 6-11, at a primary care unit in Mexico. Fifty-two records were excluded due to incomplete questionnaires, electronic records, and refusal of informed consent. The study group consisted of 435 adults and children who completed an adapted version of the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire (PSDQ) tailored for the Mexican population. The researchers also gathered anthropometric measurements of the primary caregiver (parent) and the child from the electronic record to calculate their BMI and nutritional status. We used IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 25.0 (Released 2017; IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA) to analyze the data. The Pearson Chi-square and Fisher's exact test were applied to examine interaction terms between variables, revealing a statistically significant p-value of <0.05. Results Out of the 435 patients examined, there were 229 (52.6%) children and 206 (47.3%) adult patients. Grade 2 obesity was present in 90 (39.3%) school-age children and 104 (50.5%) adult patients. The family's parenting educational style, as determined by the PSDQ questionnaire, was found to be permissive in 143 (69.4%) patients, authoritarian in 33 (16.0%) patients, and authoritative in 30 (14.6%) patients. Conclusions Parenting educational style and the PSDQ tool can be used to assess how parents influence the development of obesogenic home environments. We observed that a permissive parenting educational style was linked to a more obesogenic environment, whereas an authoritative parenting educational style was linked to a less obesogenic environment.