This just in--a news tidbit forwarded to me by my friend Sarah, who works at Radio Free Asia when she is not working to raise two lovely daughters. Sarah gets these things off the wires.
"Researchers"--I use the term loosely--at University College London said this week in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health that women who were stay-at-home mothers were more likely to be fat than women who work outside the home, and that a long-term study had shown that they consistently gained more weight than women who "occupied multiple roles over the long term."
Okay, so....A) staying home all the time makes you fat. Or, B) juggling (there's that cheerful, circus-y word again) successfully makes you fit. Or--could it be--that C) being fit in the first place makes it possible to juggle?
I don't know from reading this brief news story. But I will bet one crisp $50 bill with anybody who wants to engage in online gambling with me that all the news stories will play it as options A or B, not C....thus piling on more angst and guilt on mothers who a) have health problems or b) face employment discrimination because of being overweight or c) were just born chunky or d) have found it damned hard to work exercise into daily routines that center around taking care of everybody except themselves.I'd also love to see a longitudinal study of what happens to workers whose desks are located right next to the break room, which essentially describes the "workplace" of every stay-at-home mother I know. Do they tend to put on pounds? Hmmmm....
But wait! There's more. An Australian professor is quoted in this story as saying, "We think that women learn skills in juggling roles and one of the important things about having multiple roles is you have multiple sources of satisfaction.I wouldn't want to say that women at home are missing out but generally women who manage several roles have more sources of support and satisfaction."
The research vistas stretch out to infinity...and beyond...