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• Posted September 11, 2025

Parent-Focused Prevention Programs For Childhood Obesity A Bust, Evidence Says

THURSDAY, Sept. 11, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Programs that recruit parents to help fight early childhood obesity aren’t doing much good at all, a new evidence review says.

There’s no evidence that these programs have any impact on the body mass index (BMI) of toddlers, researchers reported in The Lancet. BMI is an estimate of body fat based on height and weight.

In short, it's not fair to ask new parents – scrambling and stressed as they are — to counter the societal and cultural forces that increase kids’ risk of excess weight, researchers concluded.

“Obesity is in large part driven by environmental and socio-economic factors that individuals are unable to change,” lead author Kylie Hunter, a research fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia, said in a news release.

“Parents play a vital role, but our study highlights that they cannot be expected to reduce childhood obesity levels alone,” she said. “Broader, coordinated action across society is needed to make healthy choices easier for everyone, regardless of where they live.”

For the review, researchers pooled data from 17 clinical trials including more than 9,000 toddlers. The trials tested the effectiveness of programs focused on building parents’ skills and knowledge on topics like nutrition, exercise and sleep.

Worldwide, about 37 million kids under 5 are overweight or obese, which can have a lifelong impact on their health. In response, many governments have made such parent-focused programs a key strategy in their efforts to prevent childhood obesity, researchers said.

The pooled data revealed that early childhood obesity prevention programs had no effect on the BMI of children by the time they’d reached 2 years old.

These included different approaches tested in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, researchers said.

“There are several potential explanations for why current parent-focused programs to prevent obesity in toddlers are not effective,” senior researcher Anna Lene Seidler, a professor at the University of Rostock in Germany, said in a news release. 

“One reason could be that the first year of a child’s life can be overwhelming and stressful for parents, leaving them with limited capacity to fully engage in behavioral changes,” Seidler said. “Once children enter broader social settings such as early child care and school, programs which create healthier environments for children directly in these setting may be more effective.”

Another key factor: "The families most affected by childhood obesity – often those in lower socioeconomic groups – are also the least likely to be reached by parent-focused early programs,” Seidler said. “They often simply do not have the resources or time to attend and adhere to these programs, particularly in the current cost-of-living crisis.”

Governments would do better to attack the societal factors that promote excess weight than expect parents to shoulder the burden, Hunter said.

“Alongside support for parents, we need to see coordinated policies which improve affordability of healthy foods, increase access to green spaces and regulate unhealthy food marketing to tackle childhood obesity,” she said.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about childhood obesity.

SOURCE: The Lancet, news release, Sept. 10, 2025