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Breastfeeding and risk of overweight and obesity at nine-years of age.
Whether breastfeeding is protective against the development of childhood overweight and obesity remains the subject of considerable debate. Although a number of meta-analyses and syntheses of the literature have concluded that the greater preponderance of evidence indicates that breastfeeding reduce…
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Prenatal exposure to maternal smoking and childhood behavioural problems: a quasi-experimental approach.
This retrospective cross-sectional paper examines the relationship between maternal smoking during pregnancy and children’s behavioural problems at 9 years of age independent of a wide range of possible confounders. The final sample comprised 7,505 nine-year-old school children participating in the…
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The effect of pregnancy intention on maternal prenatal behaviours and parent and child health: results of an Irish cohort study.
Background Unintended pregnancy is associated with increased risk for adverse neonatal and early childhood outcomes spanning an array of indicators, but it remains unclear whether these risks hold independent of other biological, social and environmental risk factors. Methods This study uses data fr…
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Maternal education inequalities in measured body mass index trajectories in three European countries
Background Social inequalities in the prevalence of childhood overweight and obesity are well-established, but less is known about when the social gradient first emerges and how it evolves across childhood and adolescence. Objective This study examines maternal education differentials in children’s…
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Socioeconomic differences in children’s growth trajectories from infancy to early adulthood: evidence from four European countries
Background Height is regarded as a marker of early-life illness, adversity, nutrition and psychosocial stress, but the extent to which differences in height are determined by early-life socioeconomic circumstances, particularly in contemporary populations, is unclear. This study examined socioeconom…
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Maternal Employment, Childcare and Childhood Overweight during Infancy
This paper examines the relationship between maternal employment, childcare during infancy and the overweight status of pre-school children. Using data from the Infant Cohort of the Growing-Up in Ireland Survey, propensity score matching addresses the issue of potential selection bias, quantile regr…
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Maternal employment and childcare during infancy and childhood overweight
Objective This paper examines the joint impact of maternal employment and childcare during infancy on childhood weight at ages three and five in the context of weak social support for early childhood care and education. Method Using three waves of longitudinal data from the Growing-Up in Ireland sur…
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Social inequality in cognitive outcomes in Ireland: What is the role of the home learning environment and childcare?
Both psychological and sociological accounts have suggested that the home learning environment play an important role in children’s cognitive development and may provide insights into inequalities in cognitive outcomes. Using the infant cohort of the Growing Up in Ireland Study (GUI), this chapter i…
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Understanding differences in children’s reading ability by social origin and gender: The role of parental reading and pre- and primary school exposure in Ireland
Given growing concerns about disadvantaged boys’ achievement and disengagement from learning, this paper investigates differences in reading ability by gender and social origin. It uses data from the Growing Up in Ireland study to investigate how parents’ approach to learning at home and children’s…