Elsevier

Appetite

Volume 90, 1 July 2015, Pages 123-130
Appetite

Research report
Strategies used by parents to influence their children's food preferences

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2015.02.038Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We describe parents' strategies to influence their children's food preferences.

  • Parents utilised diverse approaches to affect foods their children like and dislike.

  • Parents of healthy children used more of the effective feeding strategies.

  • Parents of food neophobic children used more of the ineffective feeding strategies.

  • Future interventions should target parents' strategies to influence child food preferences.

Abstract

Background: Food preferences are important determinants of children's food intakes. Parental feeding behaviours have a significant influence on the development of children's food preferences. The aim of the present study was to describe the ways in which parents attempt to influence their children's food preferences. Methods: Parents of 2–5 year old children participated in semi-structured qualitative interviews, which were transcribed and content analysed using a thematic coding manual. The parents described the ways in which they tried to influence the foods their child liked and disliked. Participants (N = 57) were separated into three separate groups based on an a priori study measuring food preferences and food neophobia: those who either had children with healthy food preferences (i.e. closely aligned with dietary guidelines) (N = 20), or unhealthy food preferences (i.e. not closely aligned with dietary guidelines) (N = 18), or high levels of food neophobia (N = 19). Results: The parents used many, diverse behaviours to influence their child's food preferences. Some of these behaviours were likely to be effective in promoting healthy food preferences in children (e.g. parental modelling, food exposure), whilst others were likely to be ineffective (e.g. forcing consumption, restricting food access). Parents of children with healthy food preferences appeared to use more of the feeding behaviours predicted to promote healthy preferences than parents in the other two groups. Parents of children with unhealthy food preferences and those of food neophobic children appeared to rely more on ineffective behaviours. Conclusion: Parents used a mixture of effective and ineffective behaviours, with parents of children with unhealthy food preferences or high food neophobia using fewer behaviours known to be effective. Interventions aimed at influencing parental feeding behaviours should include those behaviours targeted at children's food preferences.

Introduction

A large proportion of children in Western countries do not meet the recommended intakes for many foods and nutrients, despite their excess energy intake (Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2005, Department of Health and Ageing, 2008, Fox, 2004, Magarey et al, 2001, Muñoz, 1997). Children's food preferences are important predictors of their food intakes (Bere, Klepp, 2005, Birch, 1979, Birch, 1993 Domel, 1996, Resnicow, 1997). They are largely learned in early childhood and evidence suggests they can track into adolescence and adulthood (Batsell, 2002, Nicklaus, 2004, Skinner et al, 2002, Unusan, 2006). Despite their importance as determinants of food intakes, there are some important gaps in our understanding of the development of food preferences in children. For younger children (i.e. less than five years of age), the family environment is likely to be the most prominent among a range of influences on children's food preferences (Rozin, Millman, 1987, Ventura, Birch, 2008). However, the ways in which food preferences develop within families are not well understood (Logue, 1988, Rozin, 1991, Skinner et al, 2002).

The processes of food preference acquisition involve the interaction between biological taste biases and learning experiences (Birch, 1999). That is, children are born with predispositions that influence their initial food preferences, such as a preference for sweet taste or rejection of bitter taste and potentially with varied capacities to ‘taste’ (Anliker, 1991, Desor et al, 1975, Desor et al, 1977, Mennella et al, 2003, Steiner, 1979). However, these are all readily modifiable with experience (Mennella, Jagnow, & Beauchamp, 2001). Providing children with experiences that positively influence the development of their food preferences is therefore a key area of interest in this domain. Parents, via their choice of feeding behaviours, have a critical influence on the development of children's food preferences (Birch, 2002, Birch, Marlin, 1982, Mitchell, 2013, Wardle et al, 2003, Wardle et al, 2003).

To date the focus of research on the influence of parenting behaviours on the acquisition of food preferences in children has largely been in experimental contexts with a limited set of feeding behaviours, including rewarding for eating, using food as a reward, restriction and control (Birch, Marlin, 1982, Birch et al, 1984, Birch, 1982, Birch et al, 1987, Birch et al, 1987, Galloway, 2006, Newman, Taylor, 1992). This research has been valuable in determining the effects of such processes on food likes and dislikes in children, yet leaves gaps in our understanding of parents' use of such feeding behaviours in everyday life. Indeed to our knowledge only one study has explicitly focused on exploring parents' actual feeding practices to influence their children's food likes and dislikes (Casey & Rozin, 1989). Consequently it is largely unknown which behaviours parents use, as well as their relative success in influencing children's food preferences.

Studies addressing parental feeding behaviours to influence food consumption (as opposed to preferences) have noted that some of the behaviours used by parents which may positively influence consumption may theoretically have negative influences on children's food preferences. Rewarding children for eating vegetables, for example, may be used frequently by parents to positively influence consumption of the vegetables, for instance (Moore, Tapper, & Murphy, 2007), but would negatively influence the child's liking of them (Cooke et al., 2011). Similar effects would be expected with other parenting behaviours including pressure to eat (Galloway et al., 2006), restriction (Fisher & Birch, 1999) and using food as a reward (Birch et al, 1984, Cooke, 2011). Others have touched on the pathways through which parental feeding behaviours may influence children's food preferences or choices (Campbell, Crawford, & Hesketh, 2007) yet it has not been the focus of the research. As such, although there is information about parents' behaviours to influence their children's food intakes, similar information on parents' behaviours to affect children's food preferences is lacking. Bi-directionality of effect is expected: parents' feeding behaviours affect children's food preferences, but parents' feeding is also affected by their children's characteristics and behaviours such as food neophobia level, weight, extant food preferences or food refusal (Birch, Fisher, 2000, Carnell, 2011, Farrow et al, 2009, Horn, 2011, Webber, 2010).

A notable exception in the literature on parental effects on children's food preferences in naturalistic settings was a US study by Casey and Rozin in the 1980s (Casey & Rozin, 1989). This study employed a questionnaire to examine parents' use of several feeding behaviours determined by the authors or previously elicited from the parents. The results showed that the parents, who were mostly professionally employed and white, usually used the strategies of telling the child that adults liked a particular food, and involving children in food preparation. Beyond this, the predictors (such as the child's food neophobia level or gender) and consequences (such as how healthy the children's food preferences actually were) of parents' behaviours aimed at influencing food preferences were not described.

The rationale for including food neophobic children in the present study was that food neophobic children have particularly poor patterns of food preferences including reduced liking of vegetables and a narrower range of liked foods (Howard, 2012, Russell, Worsley, 2008). Knowledge of the behaviours used by parents of food neophobic children may therefore be helpful in understanding the dysfunctional relationships between child food neophobia and parental feeding. The development of unhealthy food preference patterns likely comes from the direct influence of food neophobia on children's experiences with foods (e.g. trying fewer foods) (Pliner, 1994, Pliner, Stallberg-White, 2000, Russell, Worsley, 2008), as well as the ways in which food neophobic children are fed by their parents. That is, child food neophobia likely affects and is affected by parental feeding behaviours (Dovey et al., 2008). Whilst there is evidence that parents of children high in neophobia differ in their feeding behaviours from parents of children lower in food neophobia (Wardle, Carnell, & Cooke, 2005), it is for the most part unknown whether there are particular behaviours that parents of food neophobic children use that are aimed at influencing their child's food preferences.

In summary, our objectives were threefold. First, to describe the behaviours used by parents to influence their children's food preferences in everyday life. Second, to examine possible differences in parents' feeding behaviours between parents of children with healthy food preferences and unhealthy food preferences. Third, to examine the feeding behaviours of parents of children with high levels of food neophobia. We anticipated that parents would use several behaviours to influence their children's food preferences and that parents' use of feeding behaviours would be related to the child's food preferences and food neophobia. That is, parents in the healthy group were expected to use more of the behaviours identified in experimental contexts to positively influence healthy food preferences (e.g. repeated exposure) and fewer of the behaviours previously identified to negatively influence healthy food preferences (e.g. using food as a reward), and vice-a-versa for the unhealthy group. Furthermore, parents' feeding behaviours were expected to differ between three groups due to both the parent's feeding behaviours affecting children's food preferences and the children's food neophobia affecting parents' feeding behaviours.

Section snippets

Methods

The methods have been described in a related paper which focused on part of the interview on parents' beliefs regarding the development of children's food preferences (Russell & Worsley, 2013). In brief, the sample for the current study was recruited from participants in a survey of children's food preferences (N = 371), who had been purposively sampled from high, medium and low socio-economic areas. This was achieved by ranking all of the suburbs in two cities (Adelaide and Melbourne) by the

Participants

In total 71% of those parents who had indicated they would welcome recontact agreed to participate. After removal of three interviews with insufficient audio quality, the final sample size was 57. Participant characteristics are outlined in Table 1. The majority of respondents were mothers or female carers with the remainder being fathers or male carers. Respondents were aged between 19 and 61 years (M = 36 ± 5 years) and the children were aged between two and five years (M = 3.7 ± 0.87 years) (

Discussion

This study provided novel information on the behaviours used by parents to influence young children's food preferences. The results showed that parents use a wide range of feeding behaviours intended to influence their child's food preferences, often recognising a separation between feeding behaviours that may positively influence food intakes and negatively influence food preferences.

Several of the behaviours used by parents in the present study, such as modelling, exposure and encouragement,

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    Acknowledgements: CG Russell was supported by a VicHealth/National Heart Foundation PhD Scholarship. We would like to thank Madeleine Ward for her help with the data analysis. Conflict of interest: The authors have no conflicts to declare.

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