Grandparental care and childhood obesity in China

Abstract

Ongoing increases in childhood obesity have become a serious public health concern. Meanwhile, caregiving by grandparents becomes a worldwide social phenomenon. This study estimates the effect of grandparental care on childhood obesity and explores its pathways. Utilizing five waves of panel data from the China Family Panel Studies, we found that grandparental care significantly increases the probability of childhood obesity, adding 3.6 percentage points. The effect is heterogeneous between boys and girls and between grandparents with different education attainments. The channels through which grandparents contribute to childhood obesity include inappropriate dietary patterns and insufficient physical activities. Additionally, we found that grandparents' famine experience generates a long-term fear of hunger, which translates into overfeeding their grandchildren, thus aggravating childhood obesity in China.

Keywords

• J13
• I10
• D10