Study Concludes that Everything Wrong in the World is the Fault of Women
Study Concludes That Working Moms Make Kids Fat
The more mothers work, the fatter their kids get. The solution is obviously to live in a world where, magically, economic necessity doesn't dictate that two parents earn incomes in order to adequately support children. Be richer, moms!
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago and ( Read more... )
The more mothers work, the fatter their kids get. The solution is obviously to live in a world where, magically, economic necessity doesn't dictate that two parents earn incomes in order to adequately support children. Be richer, moms!
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago and ( Read more... )
They did not control for father's employment status because over 90% of the fathers were employed at any one time, and only 3% of the families experienced changes in the male partner's employment schedule or status. They controlled for number of hours father worked, but only with two categories - fewer than 35 hours per week (part-time) and more than 35 hours per week. They didn't collect any information on the time of day that fathers worked even though they collected all kinds of information about the schedules ("standard" and "nonstandard") of the mothers.
They also only used a dichotomous measure of income which IMO is a very bad idea if you are trying to adjust for income. They did an income-to-needs ratio, which is the ratio of the family's income to the poverty threshold for each household size, and then everyone with an I-t-N ratio of 2 or less was "low-income" and everyone with a ratio higher than 2 was "high-income. I don't get why they didn't just use the continuous numbers or even quintiles (5 categories, which is pretty standard practice in health research when you really want to make categories) instead of doing a dichotomous measure.
Whether or not that the mother was employed, worked a nonstandard schedule, and the number of periods that the mother worked a nonstandard schedule weren't even significant in their model. Hours per week the mother worked was also not significant in either of the models. The only thing that was was the number of periods in the child's life that the mother was employed. The effect size was reported in the article, and it was .10. For reference, a small effect size is anything under .3, so this is a VERY small effect size.
In fact, the more important factors seemed to be number of adults in the home, the number of children in the home, being African American, and of course the child's birth weight (which had a big effect).
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