“We should encourage parents to have these routines for young children,” says Anderson. “In some families it’s going to be harder to do these things [because of] social and economic constraints, but we should consider what would make it possible for them to have these routines in their household.”
William T. Dalton III, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at East Tennessee State University, says that the relationship between the three routines in the study—as well as other factors that weren’t studied—is complex, and that they are likely interconnected.
“If children are getting adequate sleep, they’re going to have more energy during the day to be physically active,” says Dalton, who has researched the link between families and obesity but was not involved in the current study. Similarly, he adds, children who eat dinner at the table with their family aren’t eating in front of the TV, a bad habit that often leads to less mindful eating and doesn’t teach children how to regulate their food intake.
The larger household context needs to be considered, says Dalton, not just certain behaviors in isolation. “I think it’s important to look at broader family functioning, in terms of how families work as a unit,” he says. “Are the families where children don’t get enough sleep the types of families that have other challenges? [Maybe] both parents are working, so they let the children stay up later because that’s their only chance to see them, and then staying up later leads to more snacking.”
Anderson acknowledges that the study, which used surveys to gauge the frequency of each routine in households, says little about how each household implemented the behaviors. “We don’t know who was eating dinner with the kids, what kind of TV was watched, or how well the child slept,” she says. Nor did she and her co-author assess what kind of food the children ate or how physically active they were.
Anderson and her co-author are unable to say with any certainty that eating dinner together more often, getting more sleep, and watching less TV will help any given child lose weight, because of the other factors that may contribute to a child’s obesity (or that may protect normal-weight children from becoming obese).
Still, says Anderson, “We feel comfortable recommending these routines for the prevention of obesity. They may have a potential benefit for obesity, they also have a benefit for children’s development, and they’re not likely to cause the child any harm.” Although more research is needed to prove that these routines directly lower childhood obesity, she adds, parents shouldn’t wait to implement the behaviors in the study.
Nor, says Dalton, should the routines outlined in the study distract parents from the most important contributors to childhood obesity. In the end, he says, “It still comes down to eating too much and not being active enough.”
