3 - Parents' Health Beliefs

Summary

Parents influence their children's health through a variety of mechanisms, including their beliefs and behavior. This chapter will examine how parents' beliefs and behavior affect children's health attitudes, behavior, and outcomes.

Parents' Health Beliefs

Studies of parents' attitudes and beliefs suggest that parental socialization practices are guided by parents' attitudes toward and understanding of child development and behavior (cf. Grusec, Goodnow, & Kuczynski, 2000; Sigel & Dorval, 2000) within cultural contexts (Harkness & Keefer, 2000). Data supporting these relations are found most prominently in the domains of cognitive development (Miller, 2000; Sigel & Dorval, 2000) and social development (Simpkins & Parke, 2001). However, a major way in which parents influence children's health is related to their attitudes about health, and usually function via their influence on parents' behavior rather than by interaction with the child (Loveland-Cherry, Leech, Laetz, & Dielman, 1996). Studies of parents' attitudes and beliefs concerning their children's health suggest that these are important factors in parents' health behavior on behalf of their children and their socialization of children's health behavior. Parental behaviors on behalf of children's health and supervision of their children's health-related behaviors seem to reflect the parental caregiving role and parental control of many aspects of young children's behavior (Hartup, 1979). Lau and his colleagues (Lau, Quadrel, & Hartman, 1990) found that mothers influenced their children either indirectly, through the transmission of health beliefs, or directly through explicit training in four areas of health behavior: exercise, diet, alcohol use, and seat belt use.