Effects of maternal employment and child care on the health of young children

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  • March 20, 2019
Creator
  • Hubbard, Mai Noguchi
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Economics
Abstract
  • Over the past several decades, the United States has witnessed a significant increase in the prevalence of overweight and obese children. Given that the immediate and long-term implications of obesity on a child's physical and emotional well-being can be severe, biomedical researchers, social scientists, and the general public have made an aggressive push towards finding an explanation for what some have now deemed a national health epidemic. Despite a large body of empirical research on the impact of environmental, behavioral, and societal factors on the obesity increase in the past thirty years, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to examining the impact of one notable change occurring during the same time period: an increase in women's labor force participation, and consequently an increase in child care usage. This three chapter dissertation examines the effects of maternal employment and usage of non-parental after- and/or before-school supervision on elementary school-age children's body mass statuses. In the first chapter, I examine the impact of mothers' employment and non-parental after- and/or before-school care choices on three alternative body mass outcomes: risk of overweight, risk of obesity, and BMI-percentile-for-age-and-sex. In the second chapter, I exploit the availability of information on the type of non-parental supervision received (i.e., informal care with a relative, such as grandparents or siblings; informal child care with a non-relative, such as a babysitter; and formal child care) to analyze differences in the effect of child care on body mass status by type of setting. In the final chapter, I consider the density of BMI-for-age-and-sex as the specification of body mass status. I apply a flexible estimation technique, the conditional density estimation method, that discretely approximates a density function of the body mass status outcome. This approach allows covariates, such as employment and child care, to have different effects at varying levels of body mass status.
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  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Gilleskie, Donna B.
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  • Open access
Date uploaded
  • October 11, 2010

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