Perceção dos pais sobre o estado nutricional de crianças de idade pré-escolar

Introduction: The assessment of nutritional status, in addition to being an indispensable step in the study of a child, is an important indicator of health and well-being. Monitoring is important to detect excess weight early. The evidence shows that parents do not recognize weight problems in their children, underestimating their children's overweight. Aim: Classify the nutritional status of children of preschool age; analyze the parental perception regarding their nutritional status. Materials and Methods: Quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive study. Non-probabilistic convenience sample consisting of 78 children aged between 4 and 6 years attending school in Lisbon and their parents. Data collection instrument through a socio-demographic questionnaire and the “Body Silhouette Chart” silhouettes. Anthropometric assessment of the child was performed. Data collected in the first half of 2014. Statistical analysis performed using the statistical software IBM® SPSS® Statistics 19. Results: 67.1% of children are of normal weight. Most parents have a real and ideal image of normal weight (47.4% and 55.4% respectively). There is no statistically significant difference between real perception and ideal perception of parents (X2=-2.693, p=0.007). There is no statistically significant difference between real and ideal perception according to the children's gender (real image [U=616.00, p=0.688]; ideal image [U=574.50, p=0.527]. There is a statistically significant correlation between parents' real perception and BMI (rs=0.40, p<0.001). Conclusion: Most children have an adequate nutritional status, but there is a large percentage of pre-obese and obese children, so an intervention was designed with children, parents and professionals. Most parents perceive children of normal weight and like it that way, although there is a significant number in which the ideal perception is pre-obesity. It is concluded that there is no discrepancy between the real and ideal image of the children.