The aim of this paper is to provide knowledge on barriers to preventive action on early childhood overweight in non-Western migrant families. It investigates the underlying understandings of the parental role in relation to weight control present in health-care professionals and in families.
The study is based on qualitative interviews with parents who are engaged in interventions aimed at helping them and their children to adopt a healthier life style, and on interviews with health-care professionals.
The paper shows that the participating parents, most of them migrants, all low-SES and living under different forms of insecurity, perceived their parental task for the present as creating wellbeing for their children, and they were, therefore, reluctant to enforce dietary changes. The health-care professionals, in contrast, considered the need for change through a perspective on future risks, and perceived early childhood obesity as a result of parental inability to restrict their children from unhealthy foodstuff.
The contrasting understandings, the paper argues, question the suitability of the universal model of parental feeding styles, which most health care professionals rely on, and it illuminates the implications of implicitly applying this model in health interventions which involve vulnerable categories of parents such as refugees to Western societies. The paper makes the point, that health care professionals preoccupied with what they see as inadequate parental assertiveness in ethnic minority families with unhealthy and overweight young children might fail to see the whole story of parental capability, and do not fully understand the rationale behind the parental practices they are trying to change. This can result in misrecognition of already stigmatized families and decrease the likelihood of successful intervention.