The Role of Parents in Public Views of Strategies to Address Childhood Obesity in the US Summary

In this article, the focus is the public’s views on whether it’s the parents to be blamed/ held responsible for childhood obesity and how the parent’s behavior and choices can influence the success rates/efforts to help put an end to childhood obesity. This article also talked about how obesity is one of the major drivers in increasing health care costs and that the annual health care costs coming from obesity are $147 billion. Then after reading further, it shows that there was a policy support survey put out, the policy support survey measures respondents’ support for 12 policies aimed at stopping childhood obesity that has been considered at the national, state, and local levels. The policies in this support survey were chosen from a review of legislature databases.             

What was helpful/non-helpful in this article? This article was helpful to me because it shows how the public views it and who they think is to blame with the rise of childhood obesity, whether it was the school's lunch programs, the lack of government help, the food and drink industries, or the parents. After reading this article, on what the public’s views are, I think it will give me a lot of useful statistics and also possibly help me use it for an argumentative position against the governments’ stance. What wasn’t helpful in this article (and there was only one thing I could think of) is how repetitive it was with stating who is to blame for the spike in childhood obesity, which in the results showed parents were.             

Are the Author(s) credible and what is some background information? The first author that I looked up was Julia A. Wolfson; she is a mixed-methods health policy researcher at the University of Michigan. She also has a Ph.D. and an MPP. The second other I looked up is Sarah E. Gollust, she has a Ph.D. and BA. She is also an associate professor, at the University of Minnesota, specializing in the division of health policy and management. Sarah is also a member of the obesity prevention center and the Masonic cancer center. Jeff Niederdeppe is the third author of this article,

He is a professor in the department of communications at Cornel University and has over 100 peer-reviewed articles on communication, health/health policies, and medical journals. He also has his doctorate, Masters, and Bachelor of arts degree. The last person that helped in this article was Colleen L. Barry. She is a professor at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public health in the department of health policy and management. She also has her Ph.D., MPP, and BA. So yes, I do believe that this article is credible along with its authors.       

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