Lowering Parents' Stress Can Reduce Risk Of Childhood Obesity

March 11, 2026
Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

Providing support to stressed-out parents might help their children avoid obesity, a new study says.

Children were more likely to eat healthy and not gain weight if their parents participated in training to help manage stress, researchers reported March 6 in the journal Pediatrics.

“We already knew that stress can be a big contributor in the development of childhood obesity,” senior researcher Rajita Sinha, director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Stress Center in New Haven, Connecticut, said in a news release.

“The surprise was that when parents handled stress better, their parenting improved, and their young child’s obesity risk went down,” Sinha said.

Earlier research has shown that having an obese parent increases a child’s risk of obesity, researchers said in background notes.

It’s also been indicated that parental stress might be a hidden driver of childhood obesity, with stressed-out parents more likely to rely on fast food and junk food to keep their kids fed, researchers said.

Current childhood obesity prevention programs mainly focus on education around nutrition and exercise, and frequently fail to produce lasting improvements, researchers said.

For the new study, researchers recruited 114 parents with overweight or obese children ages 2 to 5 and assigned them to one of two groups.

One group underwent a mindfulness training program focused on managing stress and avoiding unhealthy behaviors along with education on healthy nutrition and physical activity. The second group only got the education on eating right and exercising.

Both groups met weekly for up to two hours, for 12 weeks. During this period, parents’ stress and children’s weight were monitored, and researchers kept an eye on the kids’ weight for three months after the classes ended.

Researchers also tracked positive parenting behaviors like warmth, listening, patience and positivity, as well as the foods children ate.

Results showed that only the mindfulness group experienced lower parental stress, improved positive parenting and less unhealthy eating among their children by three months after the classes ended.

On the other hand, children in the control group had a six-fold higher risk of overweight or obesity within three months of the classes.

“The combination of mindfulness with behavioral self-regulation to manage stress, integrated with healthy nutrition and physical activity, seemed to protect the young children from some of the negative effects of stress on weight gain,” Sinha said.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on childhood obesity.

SOURCE: Yale School of Medicine, news release, March 6, 2026

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