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Review
. 2021 Oct 22:24:101607.
doi: 10.1016/j.pmedr.2021.101607. eCollection 2021 Dec.

Dietary habits, physical activity, and sedentary behaviour of children of employed mothers: A systematic review

Sabiha Afrin  1   2 , Amy B Mullens  1   3 , Sayan Chakrabarty  1 , Lupa Bhowmik  2 , Stuart J H Biddle  1
Affiliations
Review

Dietary habits, physical activity, and sedentary behaviour of children of employed mothers: A systematic review

Sabiha Afrin et al. Prev Med Rep. .

Abstract

Since approximately 40% of the global workforce are women, a comprehensive understanding of association of maternal employment with child dietary patterns, physical activity and sedentary behaviour needs more focus. This systematic review aims to identify the association between maternal employment and dietary patterns (DP), physical activity (PA) and sedentary behaviour (SB) of children and adolescents (6 to 18 years). Searches were performed using electronic databases and manual searches. Peer reviewed journal articles, conference papers, theses at masters/doctoral levels in English were included. A total 42 studies met selection criteria, which indicated associations between maternal employment and at least one of the domains of interest: DP, PA and/or SB. Using individual samples of analysis, it was found that, 9 samples of DP, 11 samples of PA and 12 samples of SB were positively correlated with maternal employment, whereas 25 samples of DP, 5 samples of PA and 5 samples of SB showed an opposite association. Results suggest that PA and SB were positively related with maternal employment, whereas DP had an inverse relationship. Findings from this review provide evidence that children of employed mothers had poorer DP and greater prevalence of SB, however, their children are more physically active. Future interventions need to create a positive environment at the workplace and for families to support employed mothers and improve children's dietary patterns and decrease sedentary behaviours. Future studies should prioritise the domains of DP, PA and SB that have been studied inadequately and have inconsistent results.

Keywords: Children and adolescent; Dietary patterns (DP); Maternal employment; Physical activity (PA); Sedentary behaviour (SB).

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
PRISMA flow diagram for selection of studies.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The number of studies on the association of maternal employment to DP, PA and SB published per year.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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