Pre-school children's emotional eating partly shaped by innate food
drive

Date:
April 13, 2022
Source:
Aston University
Summary:
New research is helping to unpick the complex connections between
the eating habits of children and their mothers. The research
surveyed 185 mothers of young children aged between three and five,
asking about their eating habits and those of their children.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
New research at Aston University is helping to unpick the complex
connections between the eating habits of children and their mothers.


==========================================================================
The research, by PhD student Rebecca Stone, surveyed 185 mothers of
young children aged between three and five, asking about their eating
habits and those of their children. The findings are published in the
Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Children pick up lots of behaviours by copying their parents -- and this
is true of their eating habits as well. The aim of the new research was
to see how much of children's emotional eating is explained by the way
mothers use food as part of their parenting practices as well as the
children's own attitudes to food more generally.

'Emotional eating' is when we turn to food, such as cakes, chocolate
and snacks, not because we're hungry but to compensate for when we're
feeling sad, low or anxious. The survey included questions for mothers
about how much they and their children ate in response to emotional
states. It also asked about how much children were motivated by food
and driven to eat or ask for food throughout the day, which is known as
'food approach' behaviour.

Stone also asked mothers about the feeding practices that they used
with their children -- in particular about whether they used food to
reward children for good behaviour, or visibly restricted their child's
access to foods, for example having foods in the house but forbidding
them. These practices have been shown to make children more interested
in food and have also been linked to greater emotional eating in children.

When Stone analysed the responses, she found that children who were very motivated by food were more likely to pick up emotional eating behaviour
from their parents. Stone used a complex statistical method, known as
moderated mediation analysis, to decipher how the different aspects of
the relationship interacted: emotional eating in the mother, how she
parented the child around food, the child's food approach tendencies
and emotional eating.

Professor Claire Farrow, who was one of Stone's PhD supervisors at Aston University, said: "This study demonstrates that the way that children
develop eating behaviours is very complex, and that emotional eating
appears to be shaped in part by an innate drive towards food. In this
study we found that parenting practices interact with children's eating tendencies and that children who are the most driven to approach food
are the most influenced by feeding practices that can lead to emotional
eating. These findings suggests that a 'one size fits all' approach to
child feeding isn't always appropriate and that some children are more susceptible to the influence of behaviours that can lead to emotional
eating." Stone agreed: "Our findings suggest that children who were
more motivated to eat were more predisposed to associate food with
emotions. Our research supports the idea that emotional eating is a
learned behaviour which children often develop in pre-school years,
but that some children are more vulnerable to developing emotional
eating than others" Although common amongst parents, the research
also highlights that using food as a reward or visibly restricting the
child's access to certain foods -- even in children as young as three --
can be problematic. Giving a piece of chocolate as a reward or telling
children they can only have one biscuit as a 'treat' is likely to create
an emotional response in the child which they then connect to those foods.

Stone said: "The research suggests that restricting food in front of
children who are already more motivated by food tends to backfire and
makes children crave restricted foods even more. What seems to work
best is known as 'covert restriction' -- not letting children know that
some foods are restricted (for example, not buying foods that you do
not want your child to eat) and avoiding instances where you have to
tell children that they are not allowed certain foods." The researchers suggest parents looking for practical advice on healthy eating and fussy
eating should check out the Child Feeding Guide, a free online resource
created by Professor Claire Farrow, Professor Emma Haycraft & Dr Gemma
Witcomb at Aston and Loughborough Universities.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Aston_University. Note: Content may
be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Rebecca A. Stone, Emma Haycraft, Jacqueline Blissett, Claire Farrow.

Preschool-Aged Children's Food Approach Tendencies Interact
with Food Parenting Practices and Maternal Emotional Eating
to Predict Children's Emotional Eating in a Cross-Sectional
Analysis. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 2022;
DOI: 10.1016/j.jand.2022.02.001 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220413131205.htm

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