Are You Making Your Kid Fat?

Fatherhood has taught you a lot about being a role model: You bite your tongue before letting a four-letter word slip out and you wear your seatbelt. It’s just as important to show Junior how to stay fit, a new study suggests, finding that kids are especially likely to be overweight if their dad is heavy.

Even if the mother was at a healthy weight, having an overweight father increased the odds of a healthy-weight child becoming obese by the age of 9 by 318 percent compared to kids whose parents were both at healthy weights. And if the child’s father was obese, those chances skyrocketed to 1,388 percent, according to the study, which was published in the International Journal of Obesity.

Having a healthy-weight father and an overweight or obese mother, however, didn’t affect the child’s odds of becoming overweight or obese at all. Looks like this one is all on you, Dad.

“This is most likely because overweight and obese dads model unhealthy eating and exercise behaviors to their children,” says study author Emily Freeman, Ph.D., a researcher with the Fathers and Families Program an Australia’s University of Newcastle. “For example, we’ve heard lots of anecdotal evidence that if Dad is a fussy eater and refuses to eat fruits and vegetables, then his children also develop poor eating habits,” Freeman told Men’s Health.

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But what’s so special about dads? It could be Dad’s status as the head of the household, suggests Ryan Herringa, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. “Dads may dictate what kinds of foods are eaten in the house. So even though Mom may do the cooking on average, she may be doing so at the request of Dad,” Dr. Herringa says.

This is backed by a similar study published last spring in the Journal of Education and Behavior. This study found that fathers have a stronger influence on what their kids eat than mothers do—likely because fathers spend less time with their kids than mothers, and then choose to spend what little time they have with their kids sharing meals together.

“In interviews, fathers often say that when they’re hanging out with their kids they’re focused on bonding and having fun with them, not on being a disciplinarian or a teacher,” study author Alex McIntosh, Ph.D., a sociologist at Texas A&M University, told Men’s Health last May. “So they pick places to eat they think their kids will enjoy. Kids associate these places with fun and then choose to eat there again and again with or without their dad.”

So instead of bonding with your kid over McDonald’s, try mandating family dinners at home. If you need more incentive, consider that kids who eat with their families three or more times per week are 12 percent less likely to be overweight, according to a related study in Pediatrics.

And keep in mind that your kids take their exercise cues from you, too. Freeman suggests organizing fun outdoor activities with your kids to show them that exercising can be fun and involve the whole family. You can find some ideas here. And if you really want to hike up the excitement, pick some fun ways to spend time with kids from our Men’s Health Dadventure Guide.

More from MensHealth.com: Take the Fat Out of Fatherhood

Additional research by Paige Greenfield

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