In short,significantly more overweight children and parents misperceived
the child’s body size. This finding as appears to be consistent with
the social learning theory of modeling formulated by Brown and
Ogden (2004). These authors contended that parents who have
a higher level of body dissatisfaction and who undertake restrictive
diets are in fact modeling these behaviors for their children.
However, we did not specifically test the modeling hypothesis in
our study and cannot conclude that observational learning is the
process underpinning our findings.