A new study shows that low-income parents can keep a check on their child's weight issues by spending an extra minute or two with them during meal times.
"Children whose families engaged with each other over a 20-minute meal four times a week weighed significantly less than kids who left the table after 15 to 17 minutes. Over time, those extra minutes per meal add up and become really powerful," said Barbara H. Fiese, director of the U of I's Family Resiliency Program.
Children belonging to low income families often face issues with obesity which is a result of many influencing factors. Some of them include having a single parent, living in poor neighborhoods, no access to healthy food and a not-so-educated mother. However, irrespective of all these factors, this new study has found that families that spend a good amount of time together during mealtime can keep weight issues at a check.
"Three to four extra minutes per meal made a healthy weight more likely," she said.
200 families and their mealtime habits along with socioeconomic factors were analyzed during the course of this study. Each family's efforts to schedule mealtimes together, quality of meal times and if any special meaning to this practice was attached were all noted down.
It was found that children belonging to single parents were usually overweight. It was also discovered that a high number of poor income children living in one neighborhood led to them being overweight or obese.
More importantly it was found that families that spend more mealtimes together and added special meaning to this practice had children that were less prone to obesity.
Hence, Fiese said that it was important to each these low-income families the importance of mealtimes and why they should spend as much of it together.
"This is something we can target and teach. It's much more difficult to change such factors as marital status, maternal education, or neighborhood poverty," she said. "It's also important to recognize the increasing diversity of families and their sometimes complex living arrangements that may challenge their abilities to plan ahead and arrange a single time to communicate with each other."
