The big idea
Americans stigmatize parents of heavier children, specifically blaming them for their children’s weights, according to experiments conducted by our team of psychologists.
The more a person views parents as responsible for a child’s excess weight, the more likely they are to view such parents as bad parents who are lazy, overindulgent and incompetent.
Our findings corroborate what parents of children with higher weights have reported for years: that other people – friends, other parents, strangers or even their pediatricians – might blame them, dislike them and think they are poor parents.
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