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Background: Public health programs place an increasing emphasis on pre-natal care and early childhood parenting on outcomes for children. A question unaddressed is how much of an individual's current parenting behavior is influenced by the mothering received as a young child.

Design/Methods: The NLSY Young Adult Cohort is a representative sample of children born to women aged 14-22 in 1979. These women make up the NLSY79 Main Youth Cohort. The NLSY(YA) is uniquely suited to this analysis as it contains 1335 young adults who have already had at least one biological child. The data contains self-reported measures of pre-natal care (including, but limited to, doctor visits, substance use, and gestation detail) and post-natal attentiveness (such as well-care visits, breast feeding, and parental intellectual and socio-emotional connections with their children including items drawn from the HOME-SF scale) for both the Main Youth and Young Adult cohorts, allowing exploration of the impact of prior mother behaviors on a child's current parenting practices. The Data offers controls for confounding demographic and attitudinal measures for both young women and their Young Adults such as, but not limited to, age at first birth, family income, educational attainment, religious attachment, family and gender attitudes, and substance use across the life course.

Methods: Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort (follow-up from 1997 to 2015), were used to determine BMI trajectories from age 14 to 29 via group trajectory modeling. At age 29, respondents described whether pain interfered with their work inside and outside the home over the past four weeks (not at all, a little, or a lot). Multivariable ordinal logistic regression was used to evaluate pain interference according to BMI trajectory and study covariates.

Conclusions: Obesity and rapid weight gain during the transition to adulthood were associated with higher risk of pain interference among young adults.

In this letter, we show that the average growth curves of all four groups can be summarized using one equation with a single parameter. We then use that equation to put the BMIs of adults measured at different ages on a common, age-adjusted scale. Finally, we illustrate how age-adjusted BMIs can be used in epidemiology.

Ordinal regression models confirm the selection hypothesis that high-BMI adolescents are less likely to complete higher levels of education. Selection has primarily to do with the fact that high-BMI adolescents tend to come from socioeconomically disadvantaged families and tend to have low grades and test scores. Among high-BMI girls there is also some evidence that educational attainment is limited by bullying, pessimism, poor health, and early pregnancy. About half the selection of high-BMI girls out of higher education remains unexplained.

Fixed-effects models control for selection and suggest that the causal effect of education on BMI, though significant, accounts for only one-quarter of the mean BMI differences between more and less educated adults at age 29. Among young adults, it appears that most of the education gradient in BMI is due to selection.