Preschooler Obesity and Parenting Styles of Mothers and Fathers: Australian National Population Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this work was to determine relationships between BMI status at ages 4 to 5 years and mothers' and fathers' parenting dimensions and parenting styles. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS: Participants were composed of all 4983 of the 4- to 5-year-old children in wave 1 of the nationally representative Longitudinal Study of Australian Children with complete BMI and maternal parenting data. Mothers and fathers self-reported their parenting behaviors on 3 multi-item continuous scales (warmth, control, and irritability) and were each categorized as having 1 of 4 parenting styles (authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and disengaged) using internal warmth and control tertile cut points. Using a proportional odds model, odds ratios for children being in a higher BMI category were computed for mothers and fathers separately and together, after adjustment for factors associated with child BMI, including mothers' and fathers' BMI status. RESULTS: The sample was composed of 2537 boys and 2446 girls with a mean age 56.9 months; 15% were overweight and 5% were obese (International Obesity Task Force criteria). Mothers' parenting behaviors and styles were not associated in any model with higher odds of children being in a heavier BMI category, with or without multiple imputation to account for missing maternal BMI data. Higher father control scores were associated with lower odds of the child being in a higher BMI category. Compared with the reference authoritative style, children of fathers with permissive and disengaged parenting styles had higher odds of being in a higher BMI category. CONCLUSIONS: This article is the first, to our knowledge, to examine the parenting of both parents in relation to preschoolers' BMI status while also adjusting for parental BMI status. Fathers' but not mothers' parenting behaviors and styles were associated with increased risks of preschooler overweight and obesity. Longitudinal impacts of parenting on BMI gain remain to be determined.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".