This project will examine the effects of parental income and parental time available to spend at home on children's BMI and risk of obesity. The underlying premise is that children's health outcomes, like BMI, are dependent on the inputs (like income and time available for supervision) that parents are able to devote towards 'producing1 good health outcomes. Parental income and parental time available for supervision can potentially influence BMI and obesity-risk via affecting children's food consumption patterns and exercise patterns. The main hypotheses of interest are that (I) greater parental income is negatively related to obesity risk, with effects of maternal and paternal income potentially being different; (II) greater parental time at home is negatively related to obesity-risk, with effects of maternal and paternal time potentially being different; (III) the effects of parental time and income on obesity risk vary across gender and race-ethnicity. We will use data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) linked with Children of NLSY79 (CoNLSY) to test the above hypotheses. We will control for several other demographic and socio-economic characteristics, and use appropriate estimation techniques to address the problem of underlying confounding factors that can affect both children's BMI and parental resources. We will complement the above analyses by exploring potential pathways via which parental resources affect children's BMI. Since no single dataset provides all the information we require, we will draw from several large secondary datasets for this part of the analyses. The same datasets mentioned above will be used to investigate the effects of parental time and income on weekly hours spent watching television by children. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 (NLSY97) will be used investigate the effects of parental time and income on weekly hours of exercise undertaken by children. Finally, data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES) will be used to investigate the effects of parental time and income on the family's patterns of food purchases. ? ? ?
