Want your child to have good eating habits? Then look to your own, first
Parents’ eating behaviour directly influences their child’s, so it’s always a good idea to model good practices around food when you can, writes Dr David Coleman
What kind of an eater are you? Do you usually just think about food when you feel hungry? Can you ignore the rows of high sugar snacks as you walk in to pay for fuel at the petrol station? Do you reward yourself with a food treat for a job well done? Does your nightly cup of tea always come with a biscuit or two? Do you reach for food when you are bored, lonely, upset or tired?
Some recent research conducted in Aston University in the UK identified four different kinds of eating styles among parents — ‘typical eating’, ‘avid eating’, ‘emotional eating’ and ‘avoidant eating’. Typical eaters, who made up 41.4pc of the sample, have no extreme behaviours. Avid eaters (37.3pc) are very engaged by food and will eat in response to food cues in the environment and their emotions, rather than hunger signals. Emotional eaters (15.7pc) also eat in response to emotion but do not enjoy food as much as avid eaters. Avoidant eaters (5.6pc) are extremely selective about food and have a low enjoyment of eating.
Interestingly, avid and emotional eaters had, on average, higher self-reported BMI scores than typical or avoidant eaters.
The same research team also looked at the eating behaviour of the three- to six-year-old children of these parents and found very significant overlap in the eating behaviour of the parents and the children. Previous research by this team of researchers found that children’s eating behaviour is associated with the feeding practices of parents.
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.
As ever with research, the findings of this study may not tell us anything new but do provide some evidence to back up what most of us probably already know: parents are key influencers of how their children eat. Moreover, the role modelling that parents provide, in their own eating behaviour, is likely to be a key factor in that influence.
So, I come back to my opening question. What kind of an eater are you? The avid or emotional eating styles are associated with more overweight and obesity as these kinds of eaters aren’t usually responding to the satiety signals (feeling full or having had enough to eat) that their body may give.
Of course it is easy to beat ourselves up, as a parent, when it comes to our typically human mistakes in behaviour and the potential for that behaviour to negatively influence our children. I’m not interested in making people feel bad because they have chocolate biscuits with every cup of tea and can’t stop picking at all the snacks when they are over socialising at friends’ houses. I feel bad enough for these particular vices myself.
Yet, I think it can still be helpful when someone shines a light, from a new perspective, on something which we just might not pay a lot of attention to, but which could have a big impact on children’s health and wellbeing.
We definitely want our children to be healthy. Yet what and how our children eat, with rapid changes in food production, food additives, food packaging and food convenience, makes that harder and harder.
It is much easier to reach for high-sugar and high-salt snacks now, whatever the motivation. Stopping eating when we are full, or keeping our eating at moderate levels is now very difficult. I find myself saying “that’s very moreish” way more often now. All of which means that it will only become more difficult for our children to keep their eating moderate, or typical, through their lifetimes.
So, at home, let’s set up the best kind of eating habits that we can. It is a very illuminating exercise to carry out a food inventory. What’s in your fridge and your cupboards? Is it mostly pre-prepared foods, or is it mostly ingredients to prepare your own food?
When it comes to eating do your family tend to sit, together, for meals or is there a lot of grazing or convenience foods available because everyone is coming or going? Do you use food treats as a reward for your child(ren)? Do you restrict certain foods, or threaten to restrict food as a punishment?
None of us will ever be perfect and that should never be our goal as a parent. It is just too hard and too unrealistic. But there are probably opportunities to model better eating habits for our children and if that serves them well through their own lives, then that makes it worth changing.
‘We want our children to be healthy. Yet what and how our children eat, with rapid changes in food production, food additives, food packaging and food convenience, makes that harder’