Chapter 3 Child Care Choices and Childhood Obesity

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the U.S. economy experienced a sharp increase in the labor-force participation of women, causing a similar increase in the demand for non-parental child care. Concurrent with these developments has been a dramatic rise in the prevalence of childhood obesity, prompting the question as to what extent the increase in child-care utilization is responsible for the growth in obesity. This chapter examines the impact of various child-care arrangements on school-age children's weight outcomes using panel data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). An advantage of the ECLS-K for our purposes is that it tracks children's child-care arrangements between Kindergarten and the 5th grade. Our fixed-effects' results suggest that non-parental child-care arrangements are not strongly associated with children's weight outcomes. Our findings are robust to numerous sensitivity and subgroup analyses.

Citation

Cesur, R., Herbst, C.M. and Tekin, E. (2010), "Chapter 3 Child Care Choices and Childhood Obesity", Slottje, D. and Tchernis, R. (Ed.) Current Issues in Health Economics (Contributions to Economic Analysis, Vol. 290), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 37-62. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0573-8555(2010)0000290006