A study in Chile reported that heavier-weight children tend to have lower social and emotional skills. The finding was supported in both boys and girls, although the link was much stronger in girls. The study was published in Economics and Human Biology.
Obesity in children up to 5 years of age is one of the most serious public health problems in the modern era. The World Health Organization states that there are 39 million obese children worldwide. The numbers are still increasing as well as their share in the population, giving obesity the characteristics of a global pandemic.
Obesity has direct adverse impacts on health. This, in turn, increases costs in the public health sector. Studies have found childhood obesity to be associated with lower academic performance and cognitive development. Approximately a third of obese pre-school children and a half of obese school-age children remain obese in adulthood.
Aside from health problems related to obesity, obese adults tend to earn lower wages, are less likely to be promoted, and have more difficulty finding a job. Researchers have proposed that this might at least in part be explained by obese adults acquiring fewer cognitive and non-cognitive skills during childhood. Due to this, interventions against obesity in childhood, may not only improve health of those children when they become adults, but may also positively affect their economic standing.
The authors behind the new study wanted to examine the validity of this line of reasoning. They devised a study that looked into links between obesity and social and emotional skills of children in Chile. They analyzed data from the Longitudinal Survey of Early Childhood, a large-scale survey of children in Chile aiming to analyze the development of successive generations of boys and girls throughout their childhood considering the properties of the social environment they live in. They used data from three waves – from 2010, 2012, and 2017.
The study included 15,175 children up to 4 years of age in 2010. The same children were interviewed in 2012, now up to six years old. This wave included 3,135 new children up to 2 years. The third round included a total of 18,310 children.
Children’s behavior and emotional problems were evaluated using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), which was completed by mothers. The researchers used two different versions of the test (depending on the age of the children) and used different assessments provided by the test to create a combined measure of socioemotional skills of a child. They measured weight and height of the children and used this data to calculate their body mass indexes. Additionally, the researchers recorded whether a child is obese or not.
Results showed that both boys and girls with higher body mass indexes tended to have lower scores on the socioemotional skill assessment. “The estimate for obesity is also negative implying that obese girls score, on average, 7.3 percent less than nonobese girls on the CBCL test,” the researchers wrote. “The results are in line to those using previous measures of bodyweight. The point estimate indicates that a one-kilogram increase in weight is correlated with a decrease of 0.4 percent of socioemotional score. The results for boys are qualitatively similar and consistent with the results for girls. However, the estimates for girls on each measure of bodyweight are about twice as negative as for boys.”
The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about psychological consequences of obesity in children. However, it should be noted that socioemotional skills of children were assessed by parents and not practically tested. Additionally, body mass index has been criticized as a measure of excess of fat among children, meaning that it might not correspond in all cases to how overweight or obese a child is.
The study, “Bodyweight and human capital development: Assessing the impact of obesity on socioemotional skills during childhood in Chile”, was authored by Mauricio Sarrias and Alejandra Blanco.