BACKGROUND Children's eating behavior, food intake, and weight status are highly influenced by parents, who shape their food environment via parental feeding practices. The aim of this study was to investigate associations between sociodemographic, anthropometric, and behavioral/attitudinal characteristics of parents and their 5- to 9-year-old children and a range of positive ("healthy eating g...

BACKGROUND Childhood overweight has increased dramatically, particularly among young girls. Genetic and environmental factors produce the overweight phenotype. Nonshared environments appear to account for a substantial proportion of the population variance in overweight but remain largely unspecified and unmeasured. OBJECTIVE Our goal was to evaluate the influence of maternal control in feedi...

In this paper, David Olds and Harriet Kitzman review the results of the experimental literature concerning the effectiveness of home visiting programs in improving the lives of children and families. Their extensive review concentrates on randomized trials, that is, those most methodologically rigorous studies of all in which families are randomly assigned to two groups, typically to receive ei...

BACKGROUND Parental obesity is a predominant risk factor for childhood obesity. Family factors including socio-economic status (SES) play a role in determining parent weight. It is essential to unpick how shared family factors impact on child weight. This study aims to investigate the association between measured parent weight status, familial socio-economic factors and the risk of childhood ob...

BACKGROUND Previous research has found associations between parental feeding practices and children's eating behaviour and weight status. Prospective research is needed to elucidate these relationships. METHODS One hundred and fifty-six mothers of 2- to 4-year-old children completed questionnaires including measures of maternal feeding practices (pressure to eat, restriction, monitoring and m...

As show in 7,230 parent-child pairs (6,726 biological and 504 adoptive), adoptive parents and their adopted children tend to resemble each other in height, weight and fatfolds to an extent paralleling height, weight and fatfold resemblances of natural (biological) parents and their children. Accordingly, the magnitudes of parent-child resemblances commonly given may not be indicative of the ext...