Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.3390/children11060693

Publication Title

Children

Volume

11

Issue

6

Pages

693 (1-19)

Abstract

Growing rates of childhood obesity globally create concern for individuals' health outcomes and demands on health systems. While many policy approaches focus on macro-level interventions, we examine how the type of stability of a family structure might provide opportunities for policy interventions at the micro level. We examine the association between family structure trajectories and childhood overweight and obesity across three Anglophone countries using an expanded set of eight family structure categories that capture biological relationships and instability, along with potential explanatory variables that might vary across family trajectories and provide opportunities for intervention, including access to resources, family stressors, family structure selectivity factors, and obesogenic correlates. We use three datasets that are representative of children born around the year 2000 and aged 11 years old in Australia (n = 3329), the United Kingdom (n = 11,542), and the United States (n = 8837) and nested multivariate multinomial logistic regression models. Our analyses find stronger relationships between child overweight and obesity and family structure trajectories than between child obesity and obesogenic factors. Children in all three countries are sensitive to living with cohabiting parents, although in Australia, this is limited to children whose parents have been cohabiting since before their birth. In the UK and US, parents starting their cohabitation after the child's birth are more likely to have children who experience obesity. Despite a few differences across cross-cultural contexts, most of the relationship between family structures and child overweight or obesity is connected to differences in families' access to resources and by the types of parents who enter into these family structures. These findings suggest policy interventions at the family level that focus on potential parents' education and career prospects and on income support rather than interventions like marriage incentives.

Rights

© 2024 by the authors.

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.

Data Availability

Article states: "Restrictions apply to the availability of these data. Australian data were obtained from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and are available from https://growingupinaustralia.gov.au/data-and-documentation/accessing-lsac-data, accessed on 15 April 2024. UK data were obtained from the Centre for Longitudinal Studies and are available from https://beta.ukdataservice. ac.uk/datacatalogue/series/series?id=2000031, accessed on 15 April 2024. US data were obtained from the National Center for Education Statistics and are available from https://nces.ed.gov/ecls/ kinderdatainformation.asp, accessed on 15 April 2024."

Original Publication Citation

Slighting, S. A., Rasmussen, K., Dufur, M. J., Jarvis, J. A., Pribesh, S. L., Alexander, A. J., & Otero, C. (2024). Family structure, family transitions, and child overweight and obesity: Comparing Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Children, 11(6), 1-19, Article 693. https://doi.org/10.3390/children11060693

ORCID

0000-0001-9157-3493 (Pribesh)

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