AWARENESS OF PARENTS REGARDING HEALTHY LIFE AND DIET FOR CHILDREN AGED 15 YEARS OR LESS IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA

Background: Children and adolescents healthy life and healthy diet is parents’ responsibilities. Parents should provide healthy options for their children for healthy life. There is paucity of studies on the role of parents in their children healthy life. This research emerged to investigate parents’ awareness regarding healthy life and diet for children aged 15 years or less in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Methods: A descriptive, correlational cross-sectional design was employed for this study. Since this study aimed to assess parents’ awareness about healthy life and diet for children at a single point of measurement, this is the most appropriate design. Population were parents of children aged 15 years or less in KSA. Study instrument consisted of two domains. First is sociodemographic characteristics of participants. Second is awareness assessment.

Results: Study included 450 parents’ interviews. The interview was with father among 79 participants (17.6%) while it was with the mother among 276 (61.3%) participants. Both parents were present in 95 interviews (21.1%). The mean father age was 35.96 + 5.78 years and ranged from 23 to 47 years. On the other hand, the mean mother age was 30.43 + 4.95 and ranged from 23 to 39 years. The most frequent level of education among fathers was school (n= 205, 45.6%) while among mothers was university level (n= 209, 46.4%). Participants had high knowledge regarding the frequency of dairy, fruit, vegetables and cereals and grains food groups and they lack knowledge regarding meat, fish, egg and nuts. Furthermore, most participants had good attitudes toward food groups that should be eaten more and food groups that should be eaten less. There were 11.1% of participants showed high attitude (n= 50). Knowledge and attitude were statistically significant with higher educational level (P= 0.034), rural residency (P<0.001) and high family income (P= 0.003).

Conclusion: Many public health initiatives aim to change how parents think about a certain issue. In this sample, families understood the importance of a balanced diet to their health. Training and professional developing of parents to take a more proactive approach to addressing juvenile obesity would be a wise use of KSA’s ample resources.