Appraising the Effectiveness of a Parent-Led Weight Management Program for Children

Running head: PUBLIC HEALTH
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Table of Contents
Overview of the paper selected........................................................................................................2
Appraising the internal validity.......................................................................................................4
Casual association in between the exposure and the outcome is plausible or not...........................5
Appraising the external validity of the findings..............................................................................7
References........................................................................................................................................9

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Overview of the paper selected
The selected paper is Golley RK, Magarey AM, Baur LA, Steinbeck KS, Daniels LS.
Twelve-month effectiveness of a parent-led, family-focused weight-management program for
prepubertal children: A Randomized Controlled Trial Paediatrics, 2006;119(3):517-525. The
issue that has been addressed in this paper is childhood overweight. This topic is no doubt a very
important topic as overweight or obesity is not only the problem of the adults but the children are
also effected. If a person do not know the need to control the weight from the early stages of life
and if get obese then it will be difficult for the person to lose weight in the later stages of the life.
In this paper the parenting skills training has been considered as the most effective method to
control the childhood overweight as the parents are the only ones who spend most of the time
with the children (Gortmaker et al., 2015). The objective of this experiment was to evaluate the
effectiveness of the training of the parenting skills as the most important strategy for the
treatment of the overweight of children. The result of the outcome was very effective as the
result was that if the training of the parenting skills and the healthy lifestyle of the family was
combined them the approach becomes very effective in managing the weight of the perpetual
children, especially the boys. The study design was simply a single-blinded randomised
controlled trial. The trial was done for the determination of the effectiveness of two interventions
of child weight management. One of the intervention was the combination of the parenting skills
and maintaining a healthy life style while the other intervention was only training of the
parenting skills. These two interventions were compared with each other and also compared with
the control group. The control group was wait listed for the intervention for the 12 months. The
conduction of the experiment was done at 2 metropolitan teaching hospitals. The sessions of the
interventions were conducted by the same dietician. The parenting skill training programme

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includes providing the parents with proper training for managing the child’s behaviour and
weight and mostly they were taught to maintain the diet of the children and also to maintain the
behaviour activities of the child. Those parents who were under the intervention of training of the
parent and the education of lifestyle were given sessions focussing on the knowledge of life style
and also different skills including the family like practising of the healthy habits of not only the
children but also the adults as the children will learn from the adults with also recommending
about what food would be the best for them to consume, monitoring the snacks, modifying the
recipes, becoming active in a variety of ways, making the people understand about the different
roles and responsibilities about the eating habits, controlling the appetite, self-esteem and
teasing. The population of the experiment were recruited from July 2002 to August 2003 through
the publicity from media and also in the news letters in the schools. The criteria for inclusion of
the children were the children of age in between 6 years to 9 years. The care givers were selected
such that they were able to read English as well as understand English (Perng et al.,2016).
However children having the basal metabolic rate value above 3.5 were excluded from taking
part in the experiment. Part from that other children who were excluded from taking part in the
experiment were those who were obese, who were taking medicines which influence weight gain
or weight loss, children suffering from developmental disabilities or physical disabilities. The
other exclusion criteria was those children whose siblings are already taking part in the
experiment. The findings of the experiment was that all of the groups had shown significant
reduction in the basal metabolic rate after the 12 months of the trial though the reduction number
was double among those children who were kept in the intervention of the combined effects of
training of the patents and maintaining the healthy life style than those children who were under
the intervention of training of the parents. The value of the waist circumference was also