Study: Working Moms Making Kids Fatter

Posted on Feb 4, 2011

flickr /Oberazzi (CC-BY-SA)

Oh good, here’s another sciencey reason for working moms to fret. Researchers from three big U.S. universities teamed up to come to the dispiriting conclusion that there could well be a correlation between the amount of time mothers work and how much their kids weigh.  —KA

HealthDay in U.S. News:

Researchers at American University, Cornell University and the University of Chicago analyzed data on 900 school-aged children, and found that the cumulative time that a child’s mother worked was associated with a small but measurable increase in the child’s body mass index (BMI), a measurement that takes into account height and weight.

... “It’s important to emphasize that it seems to be the environmental factors associated with the total time that moms work, and not maternal employment per se, that contributes to an increase in children’s BMI,” said study author Taryn W. Morrissey, an assistant professor of public administration and policy at American University.

Surprisingly, there was no evidence that the increase in BMI was linked to more TV viewing, a decrease in physical activity, or more time spent unsupervised.

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