How much does what a parent eat influence the dietary intake of their child? Well, it depends on who you ask.
While many nutritionists and child obesity specialists believe that parents, as role models and gatekeepers for their children’s health-related behaviors, have a strong influence on children’s eating behaviors, others point to studies that show that the association is very weak.
Young people’s eating patterns are likely influenced by a variety of complex factors, and the family environment is only one such contributing factor.
For example, most children in industrialized countries eat at least one meal at school and are common “snackers.” Furthermore, this association, when stratified by age, becomes weaker as children become older and more subject to peer influence and acquire greater autonomy when making food choices.
A team of researchers led by Youfa Wang, an associate professor at the Center for Human Nutrition in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, conducted a systematic review to study the association between child and parent dietary intakes based on published studies.
The researchers also looked at this association over time, taking into consideration many societal changes, including the growing independence of children, changes in home and social environments, parenting styles, the growing proportion of working mothers, changes in food supply and distribution, and modifications in people’s dietary intake.
The methods used to study dietary intake found among these studies included food frequency questionnaires (FFQ), 24-hour recalls and multiple food records. Various statistical measures were used to quantify the associations, including average correlations coefficients and the variations across intake variables and child-parents pairs.
Results showed that only a relatively small number of previous studies have examined the child-parent association in dietary intakes. Also, most of them were based on small samples and about half were conducted in the USA.
Overall, the studies revealed that, although the reported degree of association and similarity varied considerably across studies, nutrients and foods, the association is weak.
Such findings lead these researchers to suspect that the parental and family influence on young people’s dietary intake is not as strong as many people have speculated. It is also possible that the difficult nature of accurately assessing children’s and their parents’ intakes may have weakened the observed association.
Wang and his colleagues report three main findings in this study. First, the differences in the association are noticeable across nutrient intake variables. For instance, children and their parents appeared to consume similar amounts of fat but not similar amounts of energy. This may be explained by the fact that many parents in some societies feel the desire to control for their total energy intake due to concerns of weight gain and obesity.
Secondly, they found some evidence showing that the association has become weaker over time.
Thirdly, their findings suggest that parent-child pairs in the USA have weaker association in intakes of energy and total fat compared to other non-European countries. The team attributed these differences to variations in food environment (e.g., food supply and availabilities) and parenting styles between the USA and other countries.
For instance, they suspected the parent-child similarity in dietary intakes would be stronger in at least some developing countries as children and their parents are more likely to eat more meals at home, less likely to eat snack foods and eat the same kinds of foods compared to industrialized countries.
This study provides useful insights for developing effective intervention programs to promote healthy eating in young people.
Firstly, their findings revealed the need for more studies focusing on the parent-child resemblance in diet, the differences in the association between population groups, the determinants, and related trends using nationally representative data with sound dietary assessment methods.
Also, the findings challenged the widely held assumption that it is safe to assume a child’s dietary intake by observing their parent’s, or vice versa. Additionally, more research should occur in developing countries and societies that are undergoing social and nutritional transitions.
Finally, if patterns of parental influence are to continue in the direction they are now, parents’ influence on their children’s dietary intake is likely to continue to decrease.
Therefore, in order to empower young people to develop lifelong healthy eating habits, outside influences such as local food environment, peer influence, children’s eating patterns at school, government’s guidelines and policies that regulate school meals, and the broader food environment that is influenced by food production, distribution, and advertisement must be considered in shaping a child’s nutritional knowledge on how to maintain a healthy diet.
