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Children of working mothers are more likely to be overweight or obese, Irish Examiner reports, citing a new study.

Researchers found that kids whose mothers work full time are more prone to putting on weight because they don’t get enough sleep.

In the study, published in the journal Sleep Medicine, every hour of extra sleep above the average was associated with a nearly 7% lower weight. 

The researchers followed 247 mother-child pairs — of which two thirds of the mothers were employed full time — for a year, calculating the children’s body mass index at the beginning of the study and again at the end.

At the second weigh-in, 17% of the children were found to be overweight and 12% were obese. The children of mothers in full-time employment got fewer hours of sleep on average than those whose mothers worked fewer than 20 hours per week, and were more likely to be overweight.

Fewer than one in five of the youngsters in the US study were getting the recommended 11 to 12 hours sleep a night, while the average night’s sleep was 9.6 hours.

Janet Liechty, a professor of medicine at the University of Illinois and one of the study’s authors, said: “We looked at night-time sleep in particular, because studies show that the amount of night-time sleep matters for regulating weight. We think that it might be the more hours that mothers are working, the less time they have, and there may be some trade-off going on: Do I spend quality time with my child or do we get to bed early? And then in the morning, when mothers leave for work, their children also wake up early.”