Associations between sociocultural home environmental factors and vegetable consumption among Norwegian 3–5-year olds: BRA-study

Abstract

The home environment is the first environment to shape childhood dietary habits and food preferences, hence greater understanding of home environmental factors associated with vegetable consumption among young children is needed. The objective has been to examine questionnaire items developed to measure the sociocultural home environment of children focusing on vegetables and to assess the psychometric properties of the resulting factors. Further, to explore associations between the environmental factors and vegetable consumption among Norwegian 3-5 year olds. Parents (n 633) were invited to participate and filled in a questionnaire assessing the child's vegetable intake and factors potentially influencing this, along with a 24-h recall of their child's fruit and vegetable intake. Children's fruit and vegetable intakes at two meals in one day in the kindergarten were observed by researchers. Principal components analysis was used to examine items assessing the sociocultural home environment. Encouragement items resulted in factors labelled "reactive encouragement", "child involvement" and "reward". Modelling items resulted in the factors labelled "active role model" and "practical role model". Items assessing negative parental attitudes resulted in the factor labelled "negative parental attitudes" and items assessing family pressure/demand resulted in the factor labelled "family demand". The psychometric properties of the factors were for most satisfactory. Linear regression of the associations between vegetable intake and the factors showed, as expected, generally positive associations with "child involvement", "practical role model" and "family demand", and negative associations with "negative parental attitudes" and "reward". Unexpectedly, "reactive encouragement" was negatively associated with vegetable consumption. In conclusion, associations between sociocultural home environmental factors and children's vegetable consumption showed both expected and unexpected associations some of which differed by maternal education - pointing to a need for further comparable studies.

Relationship Between Parental Lifestyle and Dietary Habits of Children: A Cross-Sectional Study

“…Previous studies showed that parental eating behaviors, lifestyle, and dietary attitudes are associated with children's dietary habits. 23,24 Our results are consistent with these earlier results, indicating that parents have a significant impact on their children's dietary attitude and behaviors. Extending these results, we investigated more comprehensively the ways this may manifest.…”

Fruit and vegetable consumption among 3–5-year-old Finnish children and their parents: Is there an association?

“…In this study, serving vegetables, berries and fruit in the home environment was also found to associate with children's fruit and vegetable consumption. The positive association between serving and children's fruit and vegetable intake is supported by previous studies conducted among under-school-aged children (Kristiansen, Bjelland, Himberg-Sundet, Lien, & Andersen, 2017a;Wyse, Campbell, Nathan, & Wolfenden, 2011). Surprisingly, serving vegetables, berries and fruit as part of an evening snack was not linearly associated with children's raw vegetables and fruit consumption.…”

“…The home environment is the first environment to shape children's relationship with food (Rosenkranz & Dzewaltowski, 2008). The fruit and vegetable consumption of under-schoolaged children has been shown to be associated with the home food environment, which includes the serving, availability and accessibility of food, family and child involvement, and parents' fruit and vegetable intake (Kristiansen, Bjelland, Himberg-Sundet, Lien, & Andersen, 2017a;Kristiansen, Bjelland, Himberg-Sundet, Lien, & Frost Andersen, 2017b;Wyse, Campbell, Nathan, & Wolfenden, 2011). The association between parents' fruit and vegetable intake and children's consumption of the food items has been mostly studied from a maternal point of view (Ong, Ullah, Magarey, Miller, & Leslie, 2017;Longbottom, Wrieden, & Pine, 2002) or by combining mother's and father's consumption habits to parental intake (Cooke et al, 2004;Fisher, Mitchell, Smiciklas-Wright, & Birch, 2002).…”

Influences of Parental Snacking-Related Attitudes, Behaviours and Nutritional Knowledge on Young Children’s Healthy and Unhealthy Snacking: The ToyBox Study

“…The parental feeding strategies for young children are known to result in differential effects on the healthiness of their children's diets [50,51]. Here, being permissive about their child's snacking promoted only unhealthy snack intake, whereas children's healthy snack intake was higher in parents who were specifically less permissive of, or less responsive to, unhealthy snacking.…”