Does Family Instability Make Girls Fat? Gender Differences Between Instability and Weight

Rising levels of overweight and obesity status are concerns for policymakers and health care providers around the globe. In the United States, rates of adult obesity have doubled during the last 30 years, and rates of child and adolescent obesity have tripled (Finucane et al., 2011; Skelton, Cook, Auinger, Klein, & Barlow, 2009). Families may play an important role in the obesity epidemic because of their role in providing children social and economic resources, as well as facilitating food and exercise preferences that may influence weight status in young adulthood. As families form and dissolve over time, the availability of these resources may change and result in new pathways for children to become overweight or obese adults. Although family structure is an important predictor of children's academic achievement and behavioral well-being, little is known about the role of childhood family instability in predicting young adult weight outcomes, or how the link between instability and weight may vary by gender.In the current study, we explore the association between cumulative family structure transitions during childhood and body mass index (BMI) in young adulthood. We do so by linking the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79; see http://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy79.htm) with the Young Adults files (YA-NLSY) to answer the following three questions: (a) Does the number of family structure transitions during childhood influence overweight or obese (OV/OB) in young adulthood, and does this association differ for males and females? (b) If the association does differ for males and females, do family structure transitions relate linearly to OV/OB for each gender? Or (c) does a particular number (and beyond) of family structure transitions relate to OV/OB (e.g., a threshold effect) for males and females?This project expands current research on family instability and child well-being by using nationally representative data to create childspecific measures of family structure transitions based on detailed maternal relationship histories that span the child's life from birth to age 18. We focus on the instability of maternal partner relationships rather than other changes within the family unit, such as the birth/death of family members, because secular trends in obesity have coincided with secular trends in relationship instability.Furthermore, we contribute to the emerging discussion in the scientific field about the association between maternal relationship instability and child and adolescent OV/OB (Bzostek & Beck, 2011; Crosnoe, 2012; Schmeer, 2012) by focusing on the OV/OB status of young adults. The young adults in our sample are a part of the "boomerang generation," a generation of young adults whowere born between the late 1970s and early 2000s (Schlitzkus, Schenarts, S Wu & Martinson, 1993), and family transitions are associated with the deterioration of parent-child relationships, even among children not living in the household (Kaufman & Uhlenberg, 1998). Females may be more negatively affected by the break down in the parent-child relationship, because females, more so than males, report the importance of maintaining positive relationships with their families (American Psychological Association, 2012). …