Zee Media Bureau
Washington: Wish to protect your children from obesity? Then, make sure that you get enough sleep everyday as a new study has linked parental sleep to children's health.
The study shows that more parental sleep is related to more child sleep, which is related to decreased child obesity.
“Parents should make being well rested a family value and a priority,” said Barbara H Fiese, director of the University of Illinois's Family Resiliency Center and Pampered Chef Endowed Chair.
The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, showed that sleep is a protective factor in lowering the incidence of obesity in parents and being overweight in preschool children.
In the study, socioeconomic characteristics were assessed in relation to protective routines and prevalence of being obese or overweight for 337 preschool children and their parents.
The routines assessed in parents included adequate sleep (over seven hours) and family mealtime routine.
The four protective routines assessed in children were adequate sleep (10 or more hours per night), family mealtime routine, limiting screen-viewing time to less than two hours a day, and not having a bedroom TV.
The only significant individual protective factor against obesity or overweight in children was getting adequate sleep.
Researchers found that children who did not get enough sleep had a greater risk for being overweight than children who engaged in at least three of the protective routines regularly, even after controlling for parents' BMI and socio-demographic characteristics.
They also learned that the number of hours a parent sleeps is related to how much sleep children are getting, so that a parent's sleep has an effect on the likelihood that their children will be overweight or obese.
“We viewed how long parents slept and how long children slept as part of a household routine and found that they really did go together,” Fiese said.
(With Agency Inputs)
