Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Research Article

Relationships of Kindergarten Childrens BMI amongst Parental Body Dissatisfaction and Dietary Restraint: A Case Study in Hong Kong

¹Department of Applied Science, Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education, Vocational Training Council, Hong Kong, China

²Healthy Living Department, Hong Kong Council of Early Childhood Education and Services, Hong Kong, China

Corresponding Author:

Dr Mok WK
Lecturer Department of Applied Science
Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education
Vocational Training Council
20 Hing Shing Road, Kwai Chung
N.T., Hong Kong, China
Tel: +852-261-23855
E-mail: vicmok@vtc.edu.hk

Received Date: July 08, 2015; Accepted Date: August 19, 2015; Published Date: August 23, 2015

Citation: Mok WK, Ip TT, Cheuk R, Lau K (2015) Relationships of Kindergarten Children’s BMI amongst Parental Body Dissatisfaction and Dietary Restraint: A Case Study in Hong Kong. J Community Med Health Educ 5:364. doi:10.4172/2161-0711.1000364

Copyright: © 2015 Mok WK, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Objective: In this study, the aim was to explore the relationships of kindergarten children’s BMI amongst parental factors such as parental BMI, body dissatisfaction, parental dietary restraint, child weight concern and child weight-focused restrictive feeding.
Method: 466 kindergarten students’ parents were participated in this study. A self-administrated questionnaire was distributed to parents. Independent t-test, one way ANOVA and Pearson’s correlation were performed to analyze the relationships amongst different factors contributing to children’s BMI.
Results: 30% parents and 37% children were found either overweight or obese. The six pathways in the proposed model were all significantly correlated. It was found that parental BMI significantly correlated with body dissatisfaction [r (466)=0.282, p<0.001], which was then associated strongly with parental dietary restraint [r (466)=0.715, p<0.001] and weakly with child weight concern [r (466)=0.146, p=0.002]. The child weight-focused restrictive feeding practice was moderately correlated with both parental dietary restraint [r (466)=0.360, p<0.001] and child weight concern [r (466)=0.320, p<0.001], and then significantly correlated with child BMI [r (466)=0.121, p=0.009].
Conclusion: The results of this study confirmed the presence of upward trend of childhood obesity in Hong Kong. In addition, parental body dissatisfaction was found to be a significant factor to determine parental dietary restraint, which was associated with child weight-focused restrictive feeding and finally affected child BMI.

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