Children are gaining weight. The alarming statistics on how many children are obese, or in danger of becoming obese, populate newspapers and TV news, as do efforts to make kids’ diets more healthy and their lives less sedentary.

Only last week, the Scottish Government announced plans to spend ?6m to improve the health of at least 20,000 overweight children through family-focused weight treatment programs. (See their press office announcement: Funding to tackle childhood obesity.)

In the struggle to reverse the trend, it seems logical to include all the key players in children’s lives, chief among them families and schools. However, recent work by John Pugliese and Barbara Tinsley at Arizona State University in the US calls into question just how much influence parents have on this issue, in particular on their children’s physical activity.

Pugliese and Tinsley combined data from 30 studies that examined the relationship between what parents do and how much their children exercise. Most of them looked at how parents modeled the importance of physical activity by exercising themselves, encouraged their children to become active, and/or facilitated their children’s physical activity, for example by driving them to sport matches or buying them equipment.

They found that parents matter – but not much. When parents encouraged exercise or facilitated it, their children were somewhat more likely to be active. However, seeing their parents being physically active did not appear to influence children’s own activity levels. The researchers also found that the more rigorous studies were less likely to produce evidence that parents influence their children in any way when it comes to exercise.

As things stand, it seems that governments should be cautious in following Scotland’s lead. When it comes to getting kids off the couch and into the gym, parents might not be the answer.

For more Prevention Action coverage of the complexity of the obesity problem, see for example, Of genes and gyms: what new research says about obesity and Mood studies are food for more thought.

• Summary of “Parental Socialization of Child and Adolescent Physical Activity: A meta-analysis” by John Pugliese and Barbara Tinsley in Journal of Family Psychology, September 2007, Vol. 21, No. 3, p. 331–343.