Study: Tantrums Lead to Obese Children

July 9, 2004 -- A new study finds that using food to calm a child's temper tantrums might lead to childhood obesity.

Published in the latest Journal of Pediatrics, the 9 ½ year study followed 150 children from birth, looking for factors that may contribute to childhood obesity. Fully 25 percent of the kids studied were overweight by age 9, with 9 percent considered to be severely overweight.

While overweight parents were most likely to have overweight children, researchers also found a link between frequent temper tantrums and childhood obesity. That is, children who threw persistent tantrums over food from ages 2-5 were three times more likely to be overweight than kids who did not often throw tantrums.

Researchers speculate that parents use food bribes to calm upset kids. "Parents aren't doing their kids any justice" by doing so, says lead study author Dr. W. Stewart Agras, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.

Additionally, the authors determined children who took shorter or fewer daytime naps from the ages of 2-5 years were also more likely to be overweight, possibly due to less energy to burn off calories.

"It's no secret that food is an emotional soother," says Dr. Madelyn Fernstrom, founder and director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Weight Management Center. "The problem with [emotional feeding] is that this is the same [problem] for most parents as well as children."

She adds: "We submit to 'head hungers' and food is considered a reward or a mollifier. The problem isn't just genetic or parental, it's also environmental and social."

Parents whose kids throw occasional tantrums need not be as concerned. The study found while 82 percent of the children in the study threw an occasional "food fit", only 19 percent had regular food tantrums. The infrequent tantrum throwers did not show a relationship between tantrums and childhood obesity.