- The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has released new guidelines for health workers about preventing obesity in children
- Say parents should be encouraged to make their children more active
- Also suggest overweight children should keep a record of how much time they spend watching TV or playing computer games
The parents of overweight and obese children should be told to cut back the amount of ‘screen-time’ their children have.
The National Institute for Health
and Care Excellence has released new guidelines for health workers which
say parents should be encouraged to find ways to make their children
less sedentary in their daily life.
For example, overweight
children should be encouraged to keep a record of how long they spend
in front of a television or computer every day as a way of monitoring
their activity levels.
The guidelines also state that NICE suggests health workers should ask parents to consider whether their children could walk to school.
Professor Mike Kelly, director of
the Centre for Public Health at NICE, said ‘We are recommending
family-based lifestyle programmes are provided which give tailored
advice.
‘These programmes will also
support parents to identify changes that can be done at home to tackle
obesity – and maintained over the long-term.
‘Many of them are things we should
all be doing anyway, including healthy eating, getting the whole family
to be more active and reducing the amount of time spent watching TV and
playing computer games.’
He added: ‘Being overweight or obese has a significant impact on a child’s quality of life.
‘It can affect their self-esteem
and they are more likely to be bullied or stigmatised. Local
commissioners – including local authorities – need to make sure that the
right services are available when families need them.
‘They also need to be convenient and easy to access – so parents and their children can stick with them.’
NICE says parents in ‘denial’
about their children being obese should also be identified to prevent
them becoming a barrier to weight loss.
The watchdog claims parents may undermine efforts to get fat children and teenagers to face up to the problem.
‘Efforts to manage a child or
young person’s weight are not always supported, and are sometimes
undermined, by members of the wider family,’ it said.’
The
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has released new
guidelines for health workers which say parents should be encouraged to
find ways to make their children less sedentary in their daily life
‘This is possibly because of a
lack of understanding of the aims of lifestyle weight management
programmes and the importance of managing the weight of obese or
overweight children and young people.
It added that a ‘lack of recognition, or denial’ can prevent them from joining, and adhering to, a weight management course.
These programmes can include
Weight Watchers, which Nice has already approved as a way for GPs to
assist patients in losing weight.
In 2011 in England, around 30 per cent of boys and girls aged two to 15 were either overweight or obese.
In the 2011/2012 school year,
around 23 per cent of children in reception, and 34 per cent in year
six, were either overweight or obese.