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The researchers revealed that social factors such as a woman's education level and marital status before pregnancy can affect the birth weight of her daughters and granddaughters. The study findings tie social and biological factors together in determining causes for low birth weight. The study is published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
Researchers considered 1,580 mother-daughter pairs, focusing on their weight at birth, marital status and education level. Researcher Jennifer Kane, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine in the US, said, "The odds of having a low-birth-weight baby were one and a half to two times greater for mothers who themselves were born low birth weight compared to mothers who were not born low birth weight. But also important are social factors, including education and marital status. Putting all of these factors - both intergenerational and intragenerational - together in a single model can tell us even more."
Kane further added, "For example, education level pre-pregnancy can be transmitted from mothers to daughters across at least three generations, and this intergenerational transmission appears to affect birth weight of future generations. And knowing that biological factors perpetuate the cycle - being a low-birth-weight baby makes a woman more susceptible to delivering the same - we start to see that we cannot look at these two factors separately. Knowing more about what causes low birth weight can help alleviate the intergenerational perpetuation of social inequality through poor infant health."
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