New research shows that parents can contribute to the development of healthy eating habits in their children through their own diet.
Research from Aston University has shown that young children often exhibit similar eating habits to their parents, with parents’ eating style influencing the way they feed their children.
The work suggests that parents can help shape healthy eating habits in their children both through their own diet and through the way they feed their children.
A team led by Professor Jacqueline Blissett from the School of Psychology and the Aston Institute of Health and Neurodevelopment (IHN) at Aston University asked parents to rate their own eating behaviour and looked for links between this behaviour and that of their children.
The team divided parents into four eating styles: “typical eating,” “enthusiastic eating,” “emotional eating,” and “avoidant eating.” Typical eaters, who made up 41.4% of the sample, do not exhibit extreme behaviors. Enthusiastic eaters (37.3%) have distinctive eating habits, such as eating in response to food cues in the environment and their emotions, rather than hunger signals. Emotional eaters (15.7%) also eat in response to emotions, but do not enjoy eating as much as enthusiastic eaters. Avoidant eaters (5.6%) are extremely picky eaters and find little pleasure in eating.
The direct links between child and parent behavior were particularly evident among parents with eager or avoidant eating habits, whose children tended to exhibit similar eating habits. Parents with eager or emotional eating habits were more likely to use food to soothe or comfort a child who then exhibited eager or emotional eating habits. When parents with eager or emotional eating habits offered a balanced and varied selection of foods, the child was less likely to exhibit the same behavior.
The research builds on previous work by the team, which identified four main types of eating behavior in children and linked parental eating habits to these characteristics.
Dr Abigail Pickard, the project’s lead researcher, said: “Parents have a big influence on children’s eating habits, but parents also have the opportunity to encourage their children to eat a balanced and healthy diet from a young age. It is therefore important to find out how parents’ eating style is linked to their children’s eating style and what factors could be changed to promote a healthy relationship with food.”
She and her team will now develop an intervention to help parents regulate their emotions in different ways, model healthy eating and create a healthy eating environment at home. This could help prevent less favorable eating habits from being passed down from generation to generation.
