Parental employment and children's body weight: Mothers, others, and mechanisms.

ABSTRACT: A robust body of literature spanning several countries indicates a positive association between maternal employment and child body mass index (BMI). Fewer studies have examined the role of paternal employment. More importantly, little empirical work examines the mechanisms that might explain the relationships between parental employment and children's BMI. Our paper tests the relationship between the cumulative experience of maternal and spouse employment over a child's lifetime and that child's BMI, overweight, and obesity at age 13 or 14. We further examine several mechanisms that may explain these associations. We use data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) merged mother-child file on cohorts of children who were born during a period of dramatic increase in bot

SUBMITTER: Ziol-Guest KM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3553269 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature