Middle-class children 'are more likely to be overweight'
A lot on her plate: A child's diet can suffer when the mother works
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The children of wealthier parents are more likely to be overweight than those from poor households, a survey has revealed.
The reason, according to researchers, is the rapidly increasing number of working mothers in the middle class.
They are forced to leave their offspring with nannies or nurseries where not enough attention is paid to diet or physical exercise.
High consumption of snack foods and sweetened drinks, long hours spent watching TV and low rates of breastfeeding are also major factors.
- The study - published in the International Journal of Obesity - revealed that children from families with an annual income between £22,000 and £33,000 were 10 per cent more likely to be overweight or obese than those from families with an income of less than £11,000.
Where the family income was £33,000 or more, children were 15 per cent more likely to be overweight than the poorest children.
Health experts said that the results were a warning to middle-class parents who often assume their children are living healthy lives.
Dr Susan Jebb, head of nutrition and health at the Medical Research Council, said: 'Obesity is something that affects middle class families as well, and that's important because many people take it to be an issue which only affects low income groups and it is absolutely not the case.
'This is a wake-up call for middleclass families.'
The study, by the Institute of Child Health at University College London and Great Ormond Street Hospital, followed the lives of more than 13,000 children born in the UK between 2000 and 2002.
By the age of three, 23 per cent were overweight.
They were more likely to have weight problems if their mother had started work following their birth and the problems increased in proportion to the amount of time she worked.
'Long hours of maternal employment, rather than lack of money, may impede young children's access to healthy foods and physical activity,' the researchers said.
'For example, parental time constraints could increase a child's consumption of snack foods and/or increase television use. We found that children were more likely to be overweight if the mother reported that she did not spend enough time with her child because of work.
'We can speculate that these children may have had greater access to convenience foods and/or fewer opportunities for physical activity.'
There are now 13.3million working women - a total which is rapidly catching up with the number of working men.
In the last 25 years the number of stay-at-home mothers has fallen from nearly 55 per cent to just over 21 per cent.
In 1984, 27 per cent of women in Britain with children under five were employed while, by 2004, 59 per cent of married or cohabiting women and 34 per cent of lone parents were employed.
Of the 13,113 families in the study, 7,629 mothers worked an average of 22 hours a week and had worked for an average of 27 months since the birth of their child.
Children in childcare were more likely to be overweight than those cared for by their mother or her partner.
In school-age children, those whose mothers worked were less likely to eat healthily than those whose mothers were full-time homemakers.
The researchers said that while breastfeeding had been found to protect children from becoming overweight, returning to work early put many women off starting or continuing to breastfeed.
No link was found between the number of hours worked by the children's father, or the mother's partner, and weight problems.
Dr Colin Waine, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said: 'I do not want to condemn these women but I do think the priority has to be the health of the child and its continued health into adulthood.
'We are in danger of raising a generation of young people with a much shorter life expectancy than previous generations.'
'If women are working, there will be less time for food preparation and more resorting to convenience food.
'The types of food children are snacking on are going to be energy-dense and there will be more sedentary hours than activity hours.'
Dr Michele Elliott, of the child protection charity Kidscape, said she believed the main factor was 'poor parenting' regardless of whether the parents were working or not.
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One minute they're fat 'cos they're poor. Now they're fat 'cos they're well-off?
Middle-class children 'are more likely to be overweight'
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