Associations Between Parental Beliefs About Their Child's Weight Controllability, Negative Weight Comments, and...

Negative parental weight talk is associated with adverse outcomes in youth. Weight controllability beliefs are linked to weight stigma, but it is unknown whether parents' general beliefs about one's control over their weight (general weight controllability beliefs), or their beliefs about parental control over a child's weight (child-specific weight controllability beliefs), are associated with how and how early parents talk about their child's weight, or whether associations differ for mothers and fathers.

US parents (N = 1936) of youth aged 10-17 completed an online survey assessing general and child-specific weight controllability beliefs, negative weight comments, and initiation of weight-related talk. Hierarchical and logistic regression analyses adjusted for sociodemographic and child-related covariates, including child current age; exploratory analyses were corrected using the Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate, and robustness was examined in prespecified sensitivity analyses.

Stronger child-specific weight controllability beliefs were associated with more frequent negative weight comments (β = 0.13, p < 0.001); this association held for both mothers and fathers and across all sensitivity analyses and was stronger among parents whose children were trying to gain weight. Child-specific beliefs were also associated with earlier initiation of weight-related talk (β = 0.05, p = 0.042), but this association was small, weakened in sensitivity analyses, and should be considered preliminary.

These findings suggest that child-specific weight controllability beliefs rather than general weight controllability beliefs were associated with negative weight talk and may inform future parent-focused education on the multifactorial nature of body weight and supportive family approaches for weight-related communication.