Mother and Child Activity is Linked: Study

Mothers, don't go assuming that your child will just run around on his or her own. According to a new study, the more active mothers are, the more active their children will be.

The study, published in Pediatrics, sought to show that policies to improve children's health and lower-childhood obesity rates should focus on mothers more than they currently do.

Researchers from various research collaborations and public health institutes monitored the activity of 554 pairs of children and their mothers.

The participants, healthy mothers and their four-year-old children, wore a lightweight heart rate monitor and accelerometer hung from their necks for seven days, even while sleeping and bathing.

According to the study, the resulting data showed a clear trend of a direct and positive association between physical activity in mothers and their children. On average, it was found that for every minute a mother engages in physical activity, their child was likely to engage in an additional 10% of the same level of activity.

Likewise, if activity levels in mothers drop, it appeared that the levels of a child's own activity dropped as well, albeit by a smaller amount.

Still, this should raise some concerns. Researchers behind the study did recognize that previous data has indicated that a great number of women undergo a significant decrease in weekly physical activity, which only rarely ever recovers to its previous levels.

According to a previous MD Connects report, other recent studies have shown that the average activity of mothers, and women in general, has been significantly decreasing with every new generation of moms. For instance, the physical activity of mothers has dropped by a whopping 14 hours a week since 1965 according to a study published last December in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings. This is in part blamed on the prevalence of technologies that encourage sedentary behavior in the average home.

The first study was published in Pediatrics on March 24.

The second study was published in the December Issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 2013.