Children are influenced by their parents’ reactions to food, researchers have shown

The children of ‘comfort eaters’ will also turn to food to comfort them, while the children of avoidant eaters will often have complex relationships with food, researchers have found. 

While professionals working with children and families have long suspected that children’s eating habits are shaped by those of their parents, new research from Aston University has been able to demonstrate this link, which has inspired them to develop a new intervention to support parents to create a healthy home eating environment.

The work suggests that parents can help to shape healthy eating behaviour in their children both by how they themselves eat, as well as how they feed their children.

Led by Professor Jacqueline Blissett, a team of researchers asked parents to assess their own eating behaviour and looked for associations between those behaviours and those of their children.

The team grouped parents into four eating styles; 

• Typical eating behaviours
• Avid eating behaviours
• Emotional eating behaviours 
• Avoidant eating behaviours

Typical eaters made up nearly half of the sample group (41 per cent) and had no extreme behaviours around food. 

Avid eaters (37 per cent) had ‘high approach’ traits, such as eating in response to food cues in the environment and their emotions, rather than hunger signals. 

Emotional eaters (15 per cent) also ate in response to emotional cues, however they did not typically enjoy their food as much as the avid eaters did. 

The avoidant eaters made up just over 5 per cent of respondents, and were extremely selective about food, having a low enjoyment of eating. 

The direct links between child and parent behaviour were particularly clear in parents with avid or avoidant eating behaviours, whose children tended to have similar eating behaviour. Parents who had avid or emotional eating styles were more likely to use food to soothe or comfort a child, who then in turn displayed avid or emotional eating traits. Where parents with avid or emotional eating traits provided a balanced and varied range of foods, the child was less likely to display the same behaviour.

The research follows on from previous work by the team, which identified the four main types of eating behaviour in children and linked parental feeding practices to those traits.

“Parents are a key influence in children’s eating behaviour but equally, parents have the perfect opportunity to encourage a balanced diet and healthy eating from a young age in their children,” lead researcher Dr Abigail Pickard said.

“Therefore, it is important to establish how a parent’s eating style is associated with their children’s eating style and what factors could be modified to encourage healthy relationships with food.”

Moving forward the team will look into developing an intervention to support parents to use other ways to regulate emotions, model healthy eating, and create a healthy home food environment, with the hope of preventing less favourable eating behaviours being passed down the generations from parent to child.

To read the findings in full please see here.