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 While several previous observational studies have suggested children
in daycare may be more likely to gain too much weight than similar
kids cared for by parents at home, the current study looked at data
on more than 10,000 youngsters and found no such connection.
“Our study casts doubt on previously held beliefs that non-parental
childcare is associated with a higher risk of obesity,” said lead
study author Dr. Inyang Isong, a researcher at Harvard University
and Boston Children’s Hospital.
The current study, like those before it, didn’t randomly assign some
kids to parental care and others to daycare, which would be the most
foolproof way to assess whether the setting or provider influences
obesity risk, Isong said.
But it did the next best thing – adjusting for a whole host of
factors that may influence obesity such as the child’s age, gender,
race and ethnicity as well as the mother’s age and weight, family
socioeconomic status, household structure and neighborhood
characteristics.
“It could also be that there are underlying factors that differ
between childcare arrangements, such as nutritional quality or
feeding practices in both the home as well as in childcare
facilities or differences in motivations behind parents’ childcare
decisions,” Isong said. “These underlying factors could be what
influence children’s weight.”
To assess how childcare settings may influence obesity, researchers
followed a nationally representative sample of about 10,700 children
from age 9 months until they started kindergarten, which is
typically around age 5 years.
At age two, 49 percent of the children were in daycare or other
non-parental childcare settings.
By kindergarten, 35 percent of the kids were overweight or obese.
One limitation of the study is that it wouldn’t show whether kids
who attended daycare might have any increased risk of obesity after
entering kindergarten, the authors note.
Even though the researchers accounted for many factors that can
influence obesity risk and may help explain any differences in
weight between kids in daycare and kids cared for at home by
parents, it’s still possible the analysis might have overlooked some
important variables, the researchers also point out
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Still, it’s not surprising that the study failed to find a clear
connection between daycare attendance and obesity, said Dr. Eliana
M. Perrin, a pediatrics and nutrition researcher at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who wrote an accompanying
editorial.
"In the complex life of today's child, it's hard to show that any
one factor – even one as important as child care attendance – causes
obesity,” Perrin said by email.
“Add to that the fact that child cares are very different from one
another in terms the foods children eat and how active children
are,” Perrin said. “And parents who have the resources to make such
choices are different in many ways from the parents who don't have
those resources. I'm not surprised that the authors didn't find a
straightforward relationship.”
To the extent parents have access to multiple childcare options,
they should do their best to vet how healthy the food and drinks are
and ensure children get plenty of physical activity during the day,
Perrin said.
“There are often financial or logistical constraints that make true
choice in that regard impossible,” Perrin noted. “So the more
important message is to society: we need to promote policies that
improve quality standards so that no family has to choose between
the health of the child and the affordability of the child care."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2e6zX6Q and http://bit.ly/2dtCIOL Pediatrics,
online October 10, 2016.
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