Parental awareness and knowledge about media literacy education on television food advertising and family eating habits / Norakmar Ajhar…[et al.]

Most food advertising on television that targeting to children containing unhealthy messages especially those focused on sugar-dense food products. There is a positive relationship between hours of television viewing and higher body weight with unhealthy eating. Television food advertising can give impact to the food preferences and choices of children as well as increase intake of unhealthy food in children which may raise the occurrence of childhood obesity thus increasing parental awareness as well as control on their children's television viewing. A crosssectional study was done among selected parents of Standard Four and Standard Five school children from three primary schools and been given a set of questionnaire. However, only 299 set of questionnaire sets were returned with complete data. Data are obtained through a selfadministered questionnaire. This study assesses awareness and knowledge about media literacy education on television food advertising among parents and the parents' control on their children's television viewing. It also determines parents' nutritional status, parents' television viewing habits and family eating habits. Results show that most of the parents (53.8%) are aware of media literacy on television food advertising and obtained the passing score. Besides, this study that 51.2% of parents have high control towards their child television viewing. Even though majority of Malaysian people watch television more than three hours in a day, but their eating habit was reported as good, as 58.5% of the respondents practice healthy eating. Furthermore, among female respondents, 35% of them were overweight and 19% of them were obese, while among male respondents, 48.6% of them were overweight and 13% of them were obese. In addition, 30% of female respondent were abdominal obesity, while 3% of male respondents were having abdominal obesity. As a conclusion, parents from those three schools have high level of awareness about media literacy education on television food advertising.