Obesity at Home: How Parental Employment Can Negatively Impact Family Nutrition

Unhealthy cafeteria lunches, easy access to fast food, and less time spent in recreational activities are long-cited examples of contributors to childhood obesity. “Parental employment and work-family stress: Associations with family food environments,” a 2012 article published in Social Sciences and Medicine, explores a lesser-known contributor—how increasingly stressful work environments for parents spill over to the home environment and impact family health. The authors’ findings show that work-life stress for mothers is strongly associated with declining nutrition at home and has greater repercussions for family nutrition than that of fathers, presumably due to the persistence of traditional gender roles in America. While parental employment also has positive impacts on children, this research highlights the importance of policies that mitigate workplace stress and enable busy parents to provide a healthy food environment for their children.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 71 percent of mothers with children younger than 18 were employed or looking for work in 2012 compared with 47 percent in 1975 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009). To examine the impact of this participation in the labor force, the authors of the Social Sciences and Medicine article collected data from 3,709 Minneapolis/St. Paul-area parents who participated in Project F-EAT, a study that measures influences within family environments that impact the physical health of adolescents. The authors’ research suggests that nutrition at home, known as the family food environment, declines as the percentage of mothers in the labor force grows. These findings indicate that the traditional domestic role of mothers, which includes meal preparation and childrearing, has endured despite women’s move into the labor force.

The study indicates that full-time employed mothers “have fewer family meals per week, [are] more likely to have fast food for family meals, [spend] less time preparing food, [provide] less encouragement for their child to eat healthfully, and [consume] fewer fruits and vegetables per day.” Full-time employed mothers spend, on average, 8.8 hours per week preparing food compared to 11.5 hours for non-employed mothers. Additionally, 65 percent of families of full-time employed mothers and 65 percent of families of part-time employed mothers have more than one fast food meal per week compared to 57 percent of families of non-employed mothers. Families of mothers with high work-life stress only have four meals together per week compared to 5.5 meals for families where mothers exhibit low work-life stress.

When analyzing the family food environment when both parents are employed, the authors find that if both parents exhibit high work-life stress, the family eats approximately 4.5 meals per week together. However, when both parents exhibit low work-life stress, the family consumes almost six meals per week together.

The lack of association between paternal employment and family nutrition reinforces the notion that mothers are primarily responsible for family food environments, regardless of employment status. According to the authors, the only significant statistic linking paternal employment to the home health environment is that, on average, fathers working full-time spend 4.7 hours per week preparing food while part-time and unemployed fathers spend, respectively, 6.8 and 7.4 hours per week preparing food.

These authors’ findings indicate that discussions about obesity prevention must also lead to improvements in work policies that decrease work-life stress for mothers. A potential improvement includes expanding the option for telework to enable parents to spend more time at home with their children. Additionally, as the familial role of men continues to evolve, the implications of paternal employment is worthy of renewed investigation.

The overarching objective of these authors is not to discourage maternal employment, but rather to find policies that reinforce the importance of familial health. The results are provocative in suggesting that the link to reducing obesity should include an analysis of the workplace.

Feature Photo: cc/(Waymond C)