Strong mom-baby relationships may protect against later obesity Posted by The Baby News on December 28, 2011 at 11:30am

It's probably happened to you at least a few times in your life: You're stressed or sad or lonely, and to help yourself feel better, you head to the kitchen and grab another bowl of ice cream/candy bar/bag of chips. It's called self-soothing, and starting during late childhood, it's something some of us do a lot. People who habitually self-soothe with food risk ending up obese.

A longterm study to be published in the January issue of Pediatrics links adolescent obesity with the relationships moms form with their toddlers. The study followed almost a thousand kids, checking in with them when they were 15, 24 and 36 months old, and then again when they turned 15. During the first 3 years, researchers studied the interactions between the toddlers and their mothers, focusing on how secure the children were that their moms were there for them during times of stress and how sensitive their moms were to their feelings; then they looked at their notes to see if there was any connection between the quality of the mom-toddler relationships and the adolescents' weight.

The results: Children who were least secure and had the least responsive mothers during their toddler years were more than two times likely to be obese at age 15. The reason: According to lead study author Sarah Anderson, a toddler whose mother doesn't or can't help her children handle stress is more likely to learn to use food as a way of self-soothing. Quoted in a news release, Anderson said:

Sensitive parenting increases the likelihood that a child will have a secure pattern of attachment and develop a healthy response to stress. A well-regulated stress response could in turn influence how well children sleep and whether they eat in response to emotional distress -- just two factors that affect the likelihood for obesity.

We're guessing that as moms, our own patterns of self-soothing probably influence our children's, too. And the more stressed we are, the harder it is to respond to our babies' stress.

How do you control your stress?