News release

From: PLOS

Parents’ socioeconomic status is more important than prenatal behaviors to a future child’s health

Socioeconomic status had greater effects on child health than parental smoking or alcohol consumption

Family socioeconomic position may be a more important determiner of children’s health than parental behaviors such as smoking, drinking or caffeine consumption, according to a study published July 23^rd in the open access journal PLOS Medicine by Gemma Sharp from the University of Exeter, UK, and colleagues.

According to the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis, prenatal and early childhood environmental exposures can affect a child’s health long-term. Most research, however, has focused on maternal behaviors, and has not included fathers, the environment in which the parents live, and other factors. To better understand how environmental influences might impact child health, the authors of this study analyzed data from four large studies of parents and children in the United Kingdom and Norway, including more than 230,000 participants, running several models to produce high confidence in the results. They looked at parental health behaviors including smoking, drinking, and caffeine consumption, as well as their socioeconomic position. They associated these variables with 72 different child health outcomes measured at six different time points, including size at delivery, body mass, hyperactivity, social communication, aggression, depressive symptoms, and more.

The authors found that maternal behaviors did not have larger effects than those of their partners. While six percent of the results found links between smoking and child health, three percent showed links for alcohol and 0.4 percent for caffeine, 15 percent of the child health effects were associated with the socioeconomic position of the child’s family. While the results are associations and based on observational data of families in the United Kingdom and Norway, the authors note that efforts to improve child health might be more effective if they are aimed at socioeconomic inequalities, rather than individual parent behavior.

Gemma Sharp adds, “Our study suggests that the social and economic circumstances children grow up in may have a greater influence on their health than specific parental behaviours during pregnancy. By analysing data from more than 230,000 participants across four long-term studies, we found that socioeconomic disadvantage was more consistently linked to poorer child health outcomes than smoking, alcohol, or caffeine use by either parent.”

“One of the most interesting findings was that we didn't see consistently stronger effects for mothers than for fathers. We often assume that a mother's behaviours during pregnancy will have a larger impact on child health because of direct effects on the developing baby. However, we found that mothers' and fathers' smoking, alcohol, and caffeine use showed remarkably similar patterns of association with child health outcomes. This also points towards the importance of the wider family environment and social circumstances, rather than pregnancy-related behaviours alone, in shaping children's health.”