Abstract
This paper examines parental influence on school children’s everyday activities that are related to a healthy or an unhealthy lifestyle. Using the Danish Time-Use and Consumption Survey from 2008/2009 with information on fathers’, mothers’ and children’s time use, we found no evidence of a relationship between parental working hours and children’s time allocations, while a 1-h increase in parental child care reduces the time children spent on TV/computer games by 12–19 min. We also found a relationship between parents’ and their children’s time use, as the amounts of time the two generations spent on exercise were positively correlated, which indicates that parental time use on some healthy activities affects children’s lifestyle behavior more than parental child care.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Using a collective household production model with a two-stage Stackelberg game structure, in which the parents are the leaders and the child the follower, You and Davis (2010) show that childhood obesity is determined by several factors such as the amount and quality of food consumed at home and away from home, a child’s time spent on exercise, and some biological, genetic and home environment factors.
Several papers have examined the relationship between maternal employment and childhood obesity, where childhood obesity is measured by the body mass index, see Anderson et al. (2003b), Classen and Hokayem (2005), Fertig et al. (2009), Courtemanche (2009), Ruhm (2008) for U.S., Zhu (2007) for Australia, Phipps et al. (2006), Chia (2008) for Canada, Garcia et al. (2006) for Spain, von Hinke Kessler Scholder (2008) for UK, and Greve (2011) for Denmark. Except for the Danish paper, all the other papers show that when mothers start working (more hours), their children are more likely to become overweight or obese.
The dependent variables we examine are the number of meals eaten during the day, and if the child ate breakfast, both of which are inversely associated with childhood obesity up to a certain extent (Dubois et al. 2005). The other dependent variables are the children’s time spent on television viewing, playing computer games and doing sport, which are considered good proxies for physical activities (Bittman et al. 2010), and related to both short- and long-term physical and mental health (Penedo and Dahn 2005; Mullahy and Robert 2010) and to obesity and lifestyle diseases (WHO 2004).
We have also estimated ordered probit models for the number of meals. However, the results from the ordered probit models were virtually the same as for the OLS models. For simplicity we present the OLS results; the ordered probit results are available upon request.
The tax rates varied between 22.1 and 27.5 with a mean of 24.9 and standard deviation of 0.79.
Different sets of instruments have been tested. For example, the F-statistic is above 2 when only the grandmother’s employment is used on maternal working hours and the local tax rate is used on paternal working hours.
Note that among mothers and fathers respectively 30 and 26 % report no working hours and 56 and 70 % report no child care time.
References
Anderson, P., Butcher, K. F., & Levine, P. B. (2003a). Maternal employment and overweight children. Journal of Health Economics, 22, 477–504.
Anderson, P., Butcher, K. F., & Levine, P. B. (2003b). Economic perspectives on childhood obesity. Economic Perspectives, 3Q, 30–48.
Benson, L., & Mokhtari, M. (2011). Parental employment, shared parent-child activities and childhood obesity. Journal of Family Economic issues, 32, 233–244.
Bittman, M., van der Ploeg, H. P., Merom, D., Chau, J. Y., Stewart, S. G., & Bauman, A. E. (2010). Advances in population surveillance for physical activity and sedentary behavior: Reliability and validity of time use surveys. American Journal of Epidemiology, 172(10), 1199–1206.
Bonke, J. (2008). Project proposal. An investigation of time-use and consumption within Danish families with special emphasis on children. Copenhagen: Rockwool Foundation Research Unit.
Bonke, J. (2009). Parental child care and money spent on their children (in Danish). Denmark: Rockwool Foundation Research Unit and University Press of Southern Denmark.
Bonke, J., & Fallesen, P. (2010). The impact of incentives and interview methods on response quantity and quality in diary and booklet based surveys. Survey Research Methods, 4(2), 91–101.
Bonke, J. & Greve, J (2010). Health, well-being and overweight in Denmark (Danish title: Helbred, trivsel og overvægt blandt danskere). Copenhagen, Denmark: Gyldendal.
Chia, Y. F. (2008). Maternal labour supply and childhood obesity in Canada: Evidence from the NLSCY. Canadian Journal of Economics, 41(1), 217–242.
Chou, S. Y., Grossman, M., & Saffer, H. (2002) An economic analysis of adult obesity: Results from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. NBER working paper 9247.
Classen, T., & Hokayem, C. (2005). Childhood influences on youth obesity. Economics and Human Biology, 3, 165–187.
Courtemanche, C. (2009). Longer hours and larger waistlines? The relationship between work hours and obesity. Forum for Health Economics & Policy, 12, 2.
Cutler, D., Glaeser, E. L., & Shapiro, J. M. (2003). Why have Americans become more obese? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 17(3), 93–118.
Davidson, R., & MacKinnon, J. G. (1993). Estimation and inference in econometrics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dubois, L., Girad, M., & Kent, M. P. (2005). Eating breakfast and overweight in pre-school population: Is there a link? Public Health Nutrition, 9(4), 436–442.
Ebbelin, C. B., Rawlak, D. B., & Ludwig, D. S. (2002). Childhood obesity: Public-health crisis, common sense cure. The Lancet, 360, 473–482.
Fertig, A., Glomm, G., & Tchernis, R. (2009). The connection between maternal employment and childhood obesity: Inspecting the mechanism. Review of Economics of the Household, 7, 227–255.
Garcia, E., Labeaga, J., & Ortega, C. 2006. Maternal employment and childhood obesity in Spain. Working paper FEDEA, Madrid.
Greve, J. (2011). New results on the effect of maternal work hours on children’s overweight status: Does the quality of child care matter? Labour Economics, 18(5), 579–590.
Kiens, B., Beyer, N., Brage, S., Hyldstrup, L., Ottesen, L. S., Overgaards, K., et al. (2007). Consequences of a physically inactive lifestyle (Fysisk inaktivitet—konsekvenser og sammenhænge) Motions- og ernæringsrådet nr 3. Retrieved from: http://www.meraadet.dk/gfx/uploads/rapporter_pdf/13.06.07%207767_fysisk_inaktivitet_webny2.pdf.
Lean, M., Lara, J., & Hill, J. O. (2006). ABC of obesity. Strategies for preventing obesity. The British Medical Journal, 333, 959–962.
Livinstone, M. B., Robson, P. J., Wallance, J. M., & McKinley, M. C. (2003). How active are we? Levels of routine physical activity in children and adults. The Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 62(3), 681–701.
Malina, R. M. (2001). Physical activity and fitness: pathways from childhood to adulthood. American Journal of Human Biology, 13(2), 162–172.
Mullahy, J., & Robert, S. (2010). No time to lose: Time constraints and physical activity in the production of health. Review of Economics of the Household, 8(4), 409–432.
OECD (2001). Early childhood education and care policies in Denmark. OECD country note.
Penedo, F., & Dahn, J. (2005). Exercise and well-being: A review of mental and physical health benefits associated with physical activity. Behavioural Medicine, 18(2), 189–193.
Phipps, Shelly. A., Lethbridge, Lynn., & Burton, Peter. (2006). Long-run consequences of parental paid work hours for child overweight status in Canada. Social Science and Medicine, 62, 977–986.
Ruhm, C. J. (2008). Maternal employment and adolescent development. Labour Economics, 15(5), 958–983.
Stewart, J. (2009). Tobit or not tobit? Bureau of labor statistics. Working paper no. 432, November 2009.
von Hinke Kessler Scholder, S. (2008). Maternal employment and overweight children: Does timing matter? Health Economics, 17, 889–906.
World Health Organization (WHO) (2004). Global strategy on diet, physical activity, and health. Retrieved from: http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/strategy/eb11344/strategy_english_web.pdf.
You, W., & Davis, G. C. (2010). Household food expenditures, parental time allocation, and childhood overweight: An integrated two-stage collective model with an empirical application and test. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 92(3), 849–858.
Zhu, A. (2007). The effect of maternal employment on the likelihood of a child being overweight. Discussion paper 2007/17, School of Economics, University of New South Wales.
Acknowledgments
The paper was presented at SFI—The National Centre for Social Research, at IATUR 2009 in Lunenburg, and at ESPE 2010 in Essen. We thank the participants at these presentations for their comments; we also thank Nabanita Datta Gupta, John Cawley, and Jay Stewart and the referees for valuable comments on previous drafts of the paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bonke, J., Greve, J. Children’s health-related life-styles: how parental child care affects them. Rev Econ Household 10, 557–572 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-012-9157-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-012-9157-6