Modeling is really important. There is abundant evidence that the mother's body mass and the child's weight are closely related. So if you want your kid to eat broccoli, you have to eat broccoli. You've got to be open-minded. Kids are not stupid.
Field also stresses the importance of parental modeling.
Neither researcher blames just one parent. It's important to make the right foods available to kids. A study by University of Chicago researcher Anjali Jain, MD, finds that obese mothers often don't think of their overweight children as overweight. Instead of looking at whether their kids are of normal weight for their size, Jain found that overweight mothers tend to focus on practical problems, such as not fitting into clothes, playground teasing about being fat, or limitations on physical activity. It's important for the doctor to step into the mother's shoes and see how they view the problem.