All of you grandmothers know you’re guilty.
After Sunday night dinner, and after dessert, as your children leave to get their children to bed, you slip an extra cookie or three into little Bobby’s hand. When grandchildren Susie and Conor sleep over, you give them cake for breakfast.
It’s harmless to spoil them when you only have them once every couple of weeks, you think. That’s surely true. But what if you were with your grandchildren every day? What would you do then?
Maybe because grandmothers are genetically predisposed to spoil their grandchildren, those children who live with their grandparents instead of their parents are 30% more likely to be obese. That’s the finding of a new metastudy compiling the results of 23 other studies that touch on childhood obesity and the role of grandparents.
As the researchers put it, “Preliminary evidence links grandparental child care to elevated risk of childhood overweight/obesity.” This was true for grandparents responsible for raising their grandchildren, as well as grandparents who lived with both their children and their children’s children.
There are plenty of possible explanations. Maybe grandparents, being older and more tired, simply lack the energy to resist Bobby’s, Susie’s, and Conor’s demands for junk food. Perhaps children without a father at home are just more likely to be couch potatoes and less likely to play sports or run around.
Maybe it’s really a story of class: Working-class and poor children are more likely to be raised by someone other than their parents, and working-class and poor children are more likely to be overweight.
