Obesity letters give parents food for thought
Jill Zeman
the Associated Press
June 2, 2006
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- It has been two years since Arkansas schools started sending letters home to parents with their children's report cards, letters telling them whether their children were fat.
Plenty of parents weren't happy. But a lot of them did something about it.
Suddenly, there were more visits to pediatricians for talks about weight problems. Fitness-class attendance is up. Diet-pill use by high schoolers is down.
Dr. Karen Young, medical director for the pediatric-fitness clinic at Arkansas Children's Hospital, told of a mother upset when she got word from school that her child was overweight. The mother wanted a second opinion from Young, but in the meantime, she cut sweets from the family diet and slimmed down the child before the appointment.
"Even though she was upset with the letter and felt it was wrong, she still changed the family's lifestyle," Young said. "A lot of positive things have come out of those letters."
The letters document each child's body-mass index, the same weight-height formula used to calculate adult obesity. The first batch went out in the 2003-04 school year.
Across the state, 57 percent of doctors said they had at least one parent bring in their child's letter from school for discussion in the past school year.
It's still a little early to see big results from the state's weigh-in program. After the first year, the proportion of overweight schoolchildren remained where it was at the start: 38 percent.
"We think probably, since there's been no change, that's probably good news," said Jim Raczynski, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. "We may have stopped the increase."
And the state has found that most parents and children are comfortable with the weigh-in program -- 71 percent of parents and 61 percent of adolescents, according to a survey.
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