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• Posted March 12, 2025

Responsive Parenting Can Help Counter Childhood Obesity

Kids are more likely to maintain a healthy weight if their parents adopt a responsive style while they’re babies and toddlers, a new study suggests.

Children had a significantly lower average body mass index (BMI) through middle childhood if they were raised using responsive parenting, researchers report in JAMA Pediatrics. BMI is an estimate of body fat based on height and weight.

“By fostering early-life responsive parenting practices, we can help establish healthy growth trajectories that may reduce the risk of obesity as children grow,” senior researcher Jennifer Savage Williams, director of the Penn State Center for Childhood Obesity Research, said in a news release.

However, researchers warned that the impact of responsive parenting diminished over time, indicating parents might need to adapt if they want to counter all of the outside influences that promote obesity in kids.

“Our intervention stopped when the participating children were 2 years old and focused on the parenting of young children rather than behaviors and risk-factors that emerge among school-aged children,” lead researcher Dr. Ian Paul, a professor of pediatrics at Penn State College of Medicine, said in the news release.

“While we are delighted that we made an impact early on, the fact that the beneficial effects disappeared by age 9 is not surprising, given the [obesity-promoting] environment we live in,” he continued. “Ongoing efforts to reinforce healthy habits throughout childhood may be necessary to sustain these benefits.”

Responsive parenting involves teaching moms and dads how to tune in to their children’s emotional and physical needs. That includes feeding, sleep, play and regulating their emotions, researchers said in background notes.

Responsive parents closely observe their children and try to understand what they’re feeling before responding to their actions.

This style can make infants and toddlers feel safe, heard and valued, while at the same time allowing parents to set fair but valuable rules and structure, experts said.

For this study, researchers recruited 232 mother-child pairs for a long-term clinical trial testing the benefits of responsive parenting.

Half the moms were randomly chosen to receive responsive parenting lessons from nurses, including home visits, during the first two years after delivery, researchers said. The other half received information on “childproofing” their home.

“In the United States, childhood obesity rates remain alarmingly high, with over 22% of children 6 to 19 years old classified as obese,” Paul said. “We aimed to address this trend through a novel intervention that emphasizes the importance of responsive parenting practices during the crucial early years of a child’s life.”

Results showed that children given responsive parenting had lower average BMI between ages 3 and 9, compared to the control group.

Girls particularly benefitted from responsive parenting, with a full point lower average BMI, 16.3 versus 17.3, researchers said.

But by age 9, the positive effects of responsive parenting had dissipated, with no significant differences in BMI between the two groups.

Researchers said these findings reinforce the idea that diet and exercise are not enough to mitigate childhood obesity, but promoting responsive parenting practices and styles may make a difference.

Implementing these practices could play an essential role in nurturing healthier futures for children, researchers concluded.

More information

Sanford Health has more about responsive parenting.

SOURCE: Penn State, news release, March 10, 2025