Working Mothers Have Fatter Children

This is one of the most unexpected results related to the emancipation of women: kids get increasingly fatter. A novel study made at the University of Bristol and published in Research in Public Policy from the Center for Market and Public Organization revealed that children aged 5 to 7, whose mothers had a full-time job had more chances of being overweight at 16. There was no sudden effect but children turned more obese with the age.

The body mass index (BMI), assessing weight correlated to height, revealed that rates of obesity in British children aged 2 to 10 boosted from 1995 to 2003 from 10 % to 15 % (in boys) and for girls the rate was 10% - 13 %. There was also an upward tendency in the number of employed women aged 16 to 59: from 59 % in 1971 to 74 % in 2007.

Previous American studies had found a correlation between full-time employed mothers and increased childhood obesity.
This new study investigates whether a child's age when the mother goes out to work affects the child's weight later in life. The new research used data coming from two British birth cohorts: the 1958 National Child Development Study and the 1970 British Cohort Survey.

The results revealed that children aged 5 to 7, with full-time employed mothers presented a likelihood increased by 5 - 8 % to be overweight, no matter the gender of the children. While the mother is outside, children's eating habits are affected.

As mothers have less time for cooking, families increasingly eat out or buy ready-made food, often junk food. The other persons who take care of the children can come up with wrong food choices. Imagine a grandma offering sugar-filled or fatty food items to the children, as these addicting types of food could lead to a bond between her and her grandchildren.

When parents are out, children are more likely to remain indoors watching TV or playing computer games while consuming junk food rather than playing outside wasting calories.

Obesity turns obvious when the child is between 5 and 7 years old because it's when children's food preferences and habits develop, due to an inner mechanism or because they start going to school.