The role of family communication and parents' feeding practices in children's food preferences

Abstract

This study used Family Communication Patterns Theory (FCPT) to explore how familydinner-related communication takes place and how parents' feeding practices may be associated with children's preferences for dinner meals. The sample consisted of 12 dyads with seven-and eight-year-old Norwegian children and their parents. In-depth photo interviews were used for collecting data. Interview transcripts and photographs were examined through content analysis.Results indicated that most families were conversation oriented, and communication tended to shift from consensual during weekdays to pluralistic at weekends. On weekdays, the dinner menu was often a compromise between children's preferences and parents' intentions to provide quick, healthy dinner options for the family. To a greater extent at weekends, children were allowed to choose dinner alternatives for the entire family. Restriction of unhealthy dinner alternatives was the practice most used to control children's diets and, in fact, might explain children's high preferences for unhealthy dinner alternatives. Results underline the importance of giving children control of what they eat and being responsive to children's preferences while guiding them towards healthy dinner alternatives rather than using force and restriction. From a more theoretical perspective, this study explored how FCPT could be combined with theories about parents feeding practices to understand meal preferences and choices among young children and their families, and how time and situation (context) influence families' communication patterns and feeding practices in their homes.

School children preferences for fish formulations: The impact of child and parental food neophobia

“…Self‐reported comments by the children suggest that T.almonds, which was prepared with a coating of bread and almonds crumbs and cooked in the oven, was the most liked dish because of its crunchiness. This result is consistent with other studies reporting that texture properties are important in children's food acceptance (Alm, Olsen, & Honkanen, ; Donadini et al, ; Werthmann et al, ; Zeinstra, Koelen, Kok, & De Graaf, ). This hypothesis was further confirmed by the reasons reported by the children for selecting T.hamburger as the least liked formulation.…”

Maternal perception of children's nutritional status in the Federal District, Brazil

“…A high percentage of mothers underestimated the nutritional status of their overweight children (39,3%), a trend that has been previously observed among parents of this population [8,7,12,13,14,31,32]. However, contrary to previous findings, 29.9% of mothers of overweight children and 47.9% of those of obese children overestimated the nutritional status of their child.…”

“…Eating habits and preferences built during childhood persist for life, and family has a strong influence on children's diet and lifestyle [6,7]. Thus, parents play a key role in preventing overweight and obesity among children [5,8].…”

The magic water test. An affective paired comparison approach to evaluate taste sensitivity in pre-schoolers

“…North and Emmet (2000) propose two explanations for this: Firstly, parents with more children have larger time-constraints and serve more ready-meals, and less healthy foods. This has been supported by recent research (Alm et al, 2015). Secondly, parents try to delay serving snacks to children until they are older for the first-born, but the younger children will receive snacks earlier as the first-born child already receives it.…”

“…In addition, parental attitudes can guide decisions on what foods they provide for their children (Alm, Olsen, & Honkanen, 2015;Dennison, Erb, & Jenkins, 2001). More specifically, parents with higher health concern serve less sugared foods to their children (Schneider et al, 2013), and their children consume more fruit (Gibson, Wardle, & Watts, 1998) and have a general healthier diet (Oellingrath, Hersleth, & Svendsen, 2013).…”