Hating your mother means you're twice as likely to grow up fat



It's difficult evaluating a study that is not yet online but this could easily be a social class effect. The underclass often have poor relationships with their children and also tend to be fat and have fat children. That could be controlled for by partialling out parental weight from the correlations but who knows if that was done? There is an extensive summary of the study here and no controls are mentioned. More magic knowledge of the causal chain apparently. The title of the journal article is: "Quality of early maternal-child relationship and risk of adolescent obesity"

Children who have a poor emotional relationship with their mother are more than twice as likely to become obese, research claims.

A study found toddlers who struggle with their mothers are at higher risk of being grossly overweight by the time they are 15. Those who had the worst emotional relationship were almost two-and-half times more likely to be obese at 15 than those with a strong bond. Meanwhile, only 13 per cent who had close bonds in their formative years became obese.

U.S. researchers studied nearly 1,000 toddlers and their mothers at play then rated how strong the bond was between mother and child.

The participants were then assessed for obesity at 15. The prevalence of obesity in adolescence was 26.1 per cent among children with the poorest early maternal-child relationships according to the research, which will appear in the online Journal of Paediatrics next month.

Ohio State University epidemiology professor Sarah Anderson said eating comfort food throughout childhood could be linked to youngsters not being given the right tools to deal with stress.

She said: ‘It is possible childhood obesity could be influenced by interventions that try to improve the emotional bonds between mothers and children rather than focusing only on children’s food intake and activity.

‘We need to think about how we can support better-quality maternal-child relationships because that could have an impact on child health.

'A well-regulated stress response could influence how well children sleep and whether they eat in response to emotional distress – just two factors that affect the likelihood for obesity.’

SOURCE

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