Hwa-Mi Yang1,2, Jina Choo1,3

1 Community Health Nursing, College of Nursing, Korea University, Seoul, Korea 2 Department of Nursing, Daejin University, Pocheon, Korea 3 Transdisciplinary Major in Learning Health Systems, Graduate School, Korea University, Seoul, Korea


Background: Using path analysis, we aimed to examine whether parenting self-efficacy and parenting styles would be significant associates with parenting behavior, and the parenting behavior would be significantly as- sociated with the obesity status of children from socioeconomically vulnerable families.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted with 61 parents and their children enrolled in public welfare systems in a community in Seoul, South Korea. Parenting behavior was defined as encouraging a child’s healthy eating habits and was measured using the Child Feeding Questionnaire.
Results: In the path model, higher levels of parenting self- efficacy and lower levels of authoritarian parenting were significantly associated with a higher level of parenting behavior, which was significantly associated with lower child body mass index z-scores.
Conclusions: Community health nurses need to provide intervention strategies for increasing parenting self-ef- ficacy and decreasing authoritarian parenting styles to promote parenting behaviors and childhood obesity pre- vention among socioeconomically vulnerable families.
Korean J Health Promot 2023;23(1):28-36

Keywords: Parenting, Self efficacy, Childhood obesity, Vulnerable populations