An Australian psychologist has criticised a controversial American health campaign for "shaming" parents of obese children.
One of the ads, which shows a mother slumping in her chair when her son asks why he is fat, puts the blame for a child's obesity on the parents.
Airing in the US state of Georgia, which has the second-highest rate of childhood obesity in the country, the ad finishes with a warning that 75 percent of parents in the state do not recognise their overweight children have a problem.
Psychologist Jo Lamble agreed parents must take responsibility for the health of their children, but said she believed shaming them would not have the desired effect.
"I think the parents are responsible. Our job as parents is to keep the kids safe and healthy and if they've got an excessive weight problem or an obesity problem, then they're not safe," Lamble told TODAY.
"Shame is paralysing, it doesn't motivate anyone to do anything," she said. "You can see that mother (in the ad), she just drops her head in shame so that's not good. It's not good for the kids to feel shame either.
Lamble also said the advertising campaign lacked any direction for the parents it was targeting, making it far less powerful.
"They don't offer any solutions," she said. "They're just raising the issue in a very confronting way and then just leaving them hanging with those feelings of shame."
But Maya Walters, a teenager who appears in one of the ads, said she was confident the campaign would have the desired effect, and has started to make changes to her own diet and lifestyle since being involved.
"I think it's really brave to talk about the elephant in the room," she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"It's very provocative and makes people uncomfortable, but it's when people are uncomfortable that change comes."
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