Next: The CRUISE manifest
Posted Jan. 11/07
Assistant professor Jennifer Stewart works in fields of health and labour economics, particularly at the points where they overlap. A US paper showing that the more hours a mother worked the higher the probability that her child would be overweight peaked her interest.
- Assistant professor Jennifer Stewart has found more data supporting the importance of a daily breakfast.
With James Chowhan, analyst with the Research Data Centre Program at McMaster University, Stewart decided to look at Canadian data. “Would we see this correlation in Canada?” she asks. “If so, could we find the underlying reasons?”
The pair turned to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, a long-term study of Canadian children begun in 1994, which is jointly conducted by Statistics Canada and Human Resources and Social Development Canada. The survey follows children’s development and well-being from birth to early adulthood, collecting information about factors influencing a child’s social, emotional and behavioural development and monitoring the impact of these factors on the child’s development over time.
Funded by Canadian Institute of Health Research, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Stewart and Chowhan used statistical techniques to analyze data on approximately 4,000 adolescents. They looked at the effect of a mother’s working hours on children at different points in their lives, and included variables that could explain changes in weight, such as television watching, receiving an allowance, and physical and creative activity.
Their findings, currently being written up, focus on children 11 years old or older — an age at which height and weight are reliably reported, and at which weight status is a good predictor for adult weight. The data show that weight does change with maternal employment, but more importantly, shows that activity variables change in an interesting way. As the number of hours a mother works increase, so does the inactivity of her child, the amount of time spent watching television and the number of skipped breakfasts. Seemingly in contradiction, as the number of weeks a mother works a year increase, the more regularly a child eats breakfast, the more activities they engage in and the less time they spend watching television.
“The children of mothers with full-time, year-round employment are less likely to be overweight than children of mothers who work outside the norm, such as seasonally, part-time or in shifts,” says Stewart. “What we are seeing is the effect of having a routine that is socially supported.”
With day care programs, homework clubs and before- and after-school activities designed for 9-to-5 families, with regular meal times and evening activities, “typical” works in these families’ favour.
“Employers and families need to take consistency into account for children’s health,” says Stewart. “Employers shouldn’t forget about casual or temporary employees in supplying benefits and programs. Parents should think about the consequences of being too rushed for breakfast in the mornings, and what their children are doing before they get home. And governments that encourage mothers to work need to think about the resources they invest in families and programming.”
That’s something to chew on.