If you're the father of a male offspring, you know what I mean when I talk about "the moment." It might be the first time your son asks you how to throw a spiral, or why girls look at him a certain way, or what type of buckshot works best for small game. The moment is exquisite because it's a sign that your son takes a genuine interest in something you care about, an area in which you have not only interest but expertise.

I had one of those moments last night. My almost-12-year-old son, who's as skinny as I was at his age, was entertaining his sisters by alternately sucking up his abs with an exercise called the vacuum, then using his diaphragm to push his little stomach out into a miniature pot belly.

The moment occurred when he asked me what muscles were responsible for these maneuvers. So I got to explain the role of the transversus abdominis muscle in supporting the internal organs. More important, though, was the chance to talk about something related to my work on his terms, based on his interest.

Maybe I'm overthinking it, but I've been cautious over the years in talking about the human body. If the subject comes up, I try not to attach any judgment to relative leanness or muscularity.

But my kids would have to be in a vegetative state not to notice that their dad takes these things seriously. That comes with the territory when you're the coauthor of The Book of Muscle, just as Ben Bernanke's kids probably understand that they're expected to keep their checkbooks balanced.*

Still, I was surprised to see this study, suggesting that a father's parenting style influences his kids' weight more than the mother's.

Australian researchers looked at a sample of nearly 5,000 preschool children. About 15 percent were classified as overweight, with 5 percent obese. They rated the parents according to the frequency of three types of behaviors: "warmth," "irritability," and "control."

A parent who scored high for both warmth and control was classified as "authoritative." An "authoritarian" parent is low on warmth but high on control. "Permissive" parents are high on warmth and low on control. And "disengaged" parents are low on both warmth and control.

And then they threw those numbers into a statistical stew with a bunch of potentially confounding variables, including obvious ones like the parents' height and weight and their relative affluence or poverty, along with not-quite-so-obvious factors, such as whether English is spoken in the home.

They found no connection between the warmth and irritability of either parent and a child's body-mass index. But fathers who scored high for control, falling into the "authoritative" or "authoritarian" parenting category, had leaner kids. "Authoritative" fathers were the least likely to have overweight or obese (O & O) children. Children of "authoritarian" fathers were 11 percent more likely to be O & O. That risk went up to 35 percent for "disengaged" fathers and a whopping 59 percent for "permissive" dads.

Here are a few key paragraphs from the discussion section of the study:

Salon's Carol Lloyd takes a shot at explaining the results:

Me? I'm just happy my son showed interest in his abs.

* For the record: I'm not equating my modest career with that of the chairman of the Federal Reserve. If we actually have that one trait in common, it may be only way our lives are remotely similar.

Wednesday blog meat

• This morning's best read: Andrew Heffernan has an insightful and very entertaining look at the lost art of spotting on the bench press.
• Joe Stankowski unloads on the notion that bodybuilding is a sport.