Children’s health-related life-styles: how parental child care affects them

This paper examines parental influence on school children’s everyday activities that are related to a healthy or an unhealthy lifestyle. Using the Danish Time-Use and Consumption Survey from 2008/2009 with information on fathers’, mothers’ and children’s time use, we found no evidence of a relationship between parental working hours and children’s time allocations, while a 1-h increase in parental child care reduces the time children spent on TV/computer games by 12–19 min. We also found a relationship between parents’ and their children’s time use, as the amounts of time the two generations spent on exercise were positively correlated, which indicates that parental time use on some healthy activities affects children’s lifestyle behavior more than parental child care. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012