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First, we discuss why trends in obesity, and childhood obesity in particular, are of interest from an economic perspective....Next, we document changes in obesity over time in the United States for adults and children....Third, we discuss changes in children's lives over the last three decades that may be causally related to weight gain. In particular, we examine the increase in mothers working outside the home. It may be that mothers who work outside the home may not have time to prepare nutritious low-calorie meals and supervise their children's outdoor, calorie-expending play. We use National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data to examine whether mothers who work more hours per week, on average, or more weeks over their children's lives are more likely to have obese children. The data contain information on many socioeconomic characteristics of families and multiple observations over time on all of a mother's children. This allows us to control for many observable and unobservable differences between mothers who work and mothers who do not that might be correlated with children's weight. For example, we can examine whether siblings' obesity status differs depending on whether their mother worked more during one sibling's life than the other's. This holds constant all of the (fixed) family characteristics that might be correlated both with children's weight and mothers' labor supply.