Study Results Say Children's Eating Habits Are Affected By Parents, How Can It Be?

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JAKARTA - A study shows that when parents are consistent with their commitment to a balanced diet, they are more likely to eat and provide healthy foods, which will foster healthy eating habits in children.

Quoted from Medical Daily, Thursday, children are strongly influenced by their parents' eating behavior, especially in terms of developing enthusiastic or avoidable eating habits, as revealed in a study published in the journal Appette.

"Parents are the main influence in children's eating behavior, but also, parents have the perfect opportunity to push a balanced diet and eat healthy from an early age in their children," said Dr. Abigail Pickard, lead researcher of the study in a press release.

"Therefore, it is important to determine how the lifestyle of parents is related to their children's diet and what factors can be modified to promote healthy relationships with food," he said.

Previous research by the same team has identified four eating behaviors in children aged three to six years: eating typical, enthusiastic, emotional, and avoiding. Typical meals are characterized by balanced eating behavior without extreme tendencies. Eat enthusiastically in response to food signs in their environment and enjoy eating.

Emotional eating involves food consumption in response to their emotions, while eating avoids being very selective about their food and generally doesn't find much pleasure in eating. For the latest study, the researchers analyzed the same group of parents as many as 785 people whose children were analyzed in previous studies.

This new study investigates how the four eating behaviors are related to their parents' eating habits. The results show that 41.4 percent of the samples are typical meals, 37.3 percent are enthusiastically eating, 15.7 percent are emotional eating, and 5.6 percent are eating avoiding.

"The direct relationship between the behavior of children and parents is very clear in parents with enthusiastic or avoiding eating behavior, where their children tend to have similar eating behavior," said the press release.

The researchers observed that when parents with an enthusiastic or emotional diet use food to entertain their children, these children tend to develop similar eating behavior. However, when these parents offer a balanced and varied diet, their children tend not to adopt the same eating habits.

"Fooding practices, such as using food for emotional regulation, providing balanced and varied foods, as well as promoting a healthy home food environment, mediating a relationship between the feed profiles of parents and children. This study emphasizes the need for detailed and adapted interventions to handle complicated relationships between the eating behavior of parents and children," the researchers wrote.