Parental time and children's obesity measures: a theoretical and empirical investigation

The increased prevalence of childhood obesity is a major concern for society. Thisstudy aims at exploring the influence of the parents (especially parental time allocationchoices) on children’s obesity-related health outcomes and examining the potentialdifferences between the fathers’ and the mothers’ marginal effects.A household with two parents and one child is modeled. The household productiontheory and the collective household modeling structure are combined. The model treatsthe mother, the father and the child as three separate agents with individual preferences.The two parents’ interaction is modeled within the collective model framework byassuming that they will reach Pareto efficient resource allocation between them. In orderto capture the dynamics between parents and the child, parents-child interaction ismodeled in a two-stage Stackleberg game structure where the child is allowed to havecertain decision choices of his/her own. This game structure allows us to explore theparental influence on the child’s health outcomes while allowing the child to haveinfluencing power in the household decision-making process. Based on this theoretical model, a general triangular system with one child’s healthproduction equation and five health inputs demand equations is derived and estimated.The empirical estimation is performed for three systems: pooled model, the youngerchildren model (of age 9 to 11), and the older children model (of age 13 to 15).The empirical results show mother-related variables show more influence on thechild’s Body Mass Index (BMI) outcomes compared to father-related variables:mothers’ BMI and mothers’ work-to-home stress spillover are positively related to theirchildren’s BMI while mothers’ time spent with their children is negatively related totheir children’s BMI. There exists a complementary relationship between mothers’income and fathers’ food preparation time. In the older children model, mothers’ ownincome increases tend to decrease their time spent with their children.The main contribution of this study is that it develops a general theoreticalframework to capture the dynamics in parents-child interaction. Based on this theoreticalmodel, empirical analysis and future work can be conducted in a theoretically consistentway.