When Jacksonville, Fla., psychologist Amanda Lochrie, PhD, decided to study children at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, she was immediately intrigued by the question of perception. To develop a program to help kids lose weight and be healthier, she first had to know how obese children felt about themselves.
What she found was surprising. Talking with nearly 150 children and their parents, the Nemours Children's Clinic researcher discovered that kids and parents both underestimated how serious the children's weight problems were. That reflected a larger trend: As waistlines in America grow, perception of what's normal also expands. "These are significantly overweight kids," Lochrie says. But "they often don't perceive themselves as overweight, and their parents don’t either."
The perception gap first showed up in the study's recruiting process. Lochrie was looking for high-risk cases, not kids who needed to lose a few pounds. To make sure she got enough volunteers, she decided to include children in the top 15 percent of their age group in terms of body mass index, or BMI, a way of evaluating the body's weight relative to its height. But when she signed up the participants, it turned out that almost all of the kids referred by schools and family doctors were at the extreme end of the spectrum: The BMIs of most of the study participants were in the 97th percentile. In other words, it took a lot before children's weight made the alarm bells start to ring in school health centers and doctor's offices.
The skewed perception reached all the way into Lochrie's lab. The seasoned nurse
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