If parents are stressed, their children risk obesity. An emotional distress experienced by mom and dad – in fact – can cause a child to gain weight and body fat when he is between 5 and 14 years old. This is demonstrated by a research by University College of London, just published in the magazine Obesity.
LONG FORM
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Body weight of the child: the first years of sight are fundamental
The first years of life are fundamental for the healthy development of the child also with regard to body weight: the lack of adequate social support, economic factors and any instability from an emotional point of view in the family can influence the state of children’s health. In the UK, for example, children living in disadvantaged areas are twice as likely to develop obesity around age five than those living in wealthier areas. This seems to be a problem that is found in all societies, as explained by the Dr. Margherita Caroli, founding member and on the board of directors of the European Childhood Obesity Group: “Childhood obesity is greater if families arrive with difficulty at the end of the month and this for various reasons. They probably live in very urbanized areas, where you can’t send their children out to play on the street, they don’t have the money for the gym and they buy foods that are less nutritionally rich, with more empty calories and more processed. They are households more influenced by negative advertising and they resort to junk food “.
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The emotional sphere, however, remains a pivotal point. Studies have already shown that a mother’s anxious lifestyle during pregnancy and early childhood was linked to an increased risk of children being overweight. But postnatal maternal stress would also affect the baby’s body mass index. And the figure of the father? Does the same propensity for rapid weight gain occur even if dad suffers from a stress disorder?
The survey
To find out, researchers at University College London used data from the Millennium Cohort Study, longitudinal survey of Centre for Longitudinal Studies of the University of London, and carried out the study on 19,000 families with children born between 2000 and 2002.
The first wave of data collection occurred at the age of 9 months, with follow-up at the age of 3, 5, 7, 11 and 14 years, compared with the state of stress in the parents in the same period. Other factors considered were family income, maternal and paternal employment, level of education and body mass index, child’s birth weight, duration from breastfeeding.
10 percent of mothers and 6 percent of fathers reported suffering from anxiety when their child was 9 months old. The percentage then remained unchanged for women but rose to 10 percent for men when the child reached the age of three.
The investigation into the effects of parental stress
According to the study, the effect of paternal stress in early childhood would lead to a more rapid increase in body mass and fat in both boys and girls, while that of mothers would mainly affect girls. Boys seem to be mainly influenced by the father and around nine months, while the girls have proved sensitive to the emotional problems suffered by both the father and the mother.
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Obesity is a multifactorial disease, there is always a bit of everything. And a lot depends on the mother figure. “Often depressed mothers do not recognize the language of their children, they do not know how to distinguish crying from hunger from the request for cuddles or from that ‘I’m wet’ – continues Dr. Caroli – and for this reason they can overfeed the child or underfeed it. It is simpler. feeding a crying baby rather than wondering why he does it. In cases of depression, then, the most frequently used technique to solve anxiety is to feed him. And so it begins l’emotional eating, the emotional eating. The child confuses every negative sensation in his body with hunger and continues to eat out of boredom, out of anger, for everything “.
The results of the study by the University College of London, as stated by the researchers, are only the result of associations and do not establish real randomness, but are important to focus on all the elements that contribute to increasing the rampant phenomenon of childhood obesity.
The Italian situation
The data for 2019, presented in November 2020 by OKkio to HEALTH, the Italian surveillance system on overweight and obesity in primary school children, place Italy among the European countries with the highest values of excess weight in the school-age population, with a percentage of 20.4% of children in overweight and 9.4% obese. This condition is also leading to the onset of pathologies that were previously infrequent in childhood, such as hypertension and type 2 diabetes.
To stem the problem it is essential to work on several fronts: provide psychological and social support to parents, indicate the correct diet to follow and invite them to increase movement, both in play and in sport. It is also important to act on incorrect behavior such as using food as a reward or allowing the little ones to take refuge in eating to feel reassured and thus compensate for lack of attention or affection.
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