Parents' attitude to food can affect children's eating habits

PARENTS NEED to be made more aware of how their attitudes to eating can affect their children, a conference has been told.

Aifric Collins, who researched the effects of parental eating patterns on the development of their children’s eating habits, called for an effective parenting guide on eating.

“Research indicates the main factors influencing children’s eating patterns are parental feeding strategies, parental modelling and the child’s perception of his/her parents’ attitude towards food,” Ms Collins said.

Some parents used restrictive feeding practices, by discouraging children from eating large portions and banning snacks, she said.

Research had found this may foster an early predisposition for body dissatisfaction or may heighten the child’s desire to eat forbidden food types when available, even in the absence of hunger.

Other parents used “pressurising feeding practices”, which encouraged children to eat more than they wanted and offered food as a reward.

Some research had highlighted the negative consequences of this, she said, as it could give children the habit of eating without being hungry.

“Both of the eating habits associated with the use of restriction as a feeding practice have been linked with the development in later life of serious disorders such as body dissatisfaction, obesity or depression,” Ms Collins said.

She was speaking at the Psychological Society of Ireland’s annual conference at the weekend.

Her own small-scale study of 52 six to nine year olds found that reported pressure from parents to eat did not show high levels of children eating when not hungry.

“It may be then that certain children need encouragement at meal times to eat adequate portions of food, which they would not do so without some gentle pressure from parents,” she said.

Some parents who restricted their child’s diet had children with above average levels of external eating, while others had children who showed high levels of restrained eating, she said.

Ms Collins, who conducted the research at Trinity College Dublin with her mentor Dr Elizabeth Nixon, said the best advice for parents was to educate children about healthy eating and portion sizes in a non-critical manner.

She cautioned against forcing children to finish their meals if they did not wish to.

Ms Collins’s address was one of more than 200 papers, posters and symposia presented at the four-day conference in Wexford which ended on Sunday.

Research was presented on issues varying from discrimination to child abuse, to the psychological benefits of breast reduction surgery.