Parenting styles in relation to body weight and smoking and drinking in children and adolescents: a longitudinal twin study

Objectives: Family provides an environmental and emotional context for children’s development and significantly influences children’s health across their life course. Given the prevalence of childhood obesity and deviant behaviors, parenting styles, which are potentially modifiable by interventions, have received increasing attention. However, the vast majority of the relevant research, so far, fails to account for the heritability of studied traits. This dissertation aims to estimate the role of paternal and maternal parenting effects and gene-environment interaction in developing obesity and alcohol and tobacco use in a genetically informative design. Method: Data was retrieved from the first two waves of the German Twin Family Panel. Participants comprised three birth cohorts aged 5, 11, and 17 years, with approximately 500 pairs of same-sex monozygotic (MZ) twins and 500 pairs of same-sex dizygotic twins (DZ) per cohort. Self-reported parenting styles were measured in 5 dimensions: emotional warmth, psychological control, negative communication, monitoring, and inconsistent parenting. Outcome variables included children’s body mass index z-score (BMIz) and smoking and alcohol drinking frequency. The differencing method was used to examine the relationship between within-MZ-pair differences in parenting styles and health outcomes, controlling for genetic influences and other shared characteristics between twins. Gene-environment interaction models were used to explore how parenting styles might moderate genetic and environmental influences on BMI and smoking and drinking behaviors. Results: This study found that when controlling for genetic, shared environmental effects, and body weight status at baseline, the twin who received harsher communication had lower BMI than their co-twin. Twins’ sex and age significantly moderated the effect of negative communication. Parenting was a significant moderator of genetic and environment effects on BMI at age 5, but no interaction effect was found for BMI at age 11 and 17. A positive interaction of genetic effects with two parenting dimensions (i.e., emotional warmth and psychological control) was found for BMI at age 5, indicating that genetic influences on BMI increased with maternal warmth and psychological control. Regarding adolescent smoking, a positive interaction between genetic effects and negative communication was found, indicating that genetic influences on smoking increased with negative communication. There were no significant moderating effects of parenting styles on adolescent drinking. Conclusions: This study found some preliminary evidence that parenting styles moderate genetic and environmental impacts on body weight status and smoking and drinking. Significant moderation effects of parenting on BMI have been observed only at a very young age in this study. Adolescent smoking appears to be more strongly influenced by the moderating effects of parenting than does teenage drinking. These findings indicate that a developmental perspective should be adopted to understand how parental influences may vary across different ages and phenotypes. Although the current analyses leave many remaining questions, this study’s findings serve as an essential first attempt to unravel the complex interactions of genes and parenting in the development of obesity and smoking and drinking behaviors.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Community Health

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Ji, Mengmeng

Contributors dc:contributor

• Jan, Yih-Kuen
• An, Ruopeng
• Duncan, Alexis
• Andrade, Flavia

• Obesity
• Smoking
• Drinking
• Twin study
• Heritability
• Gene-Environment Interaction

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2021 Mengmeng Ji

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113315

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/113315