Abstract
Although there is a large body of research connecting emotion to eating behaviors, little is known about the role of caregivers’ responses to children’s emotions in the context of child feeding. The purpose of this study was to analyze the relation between caregivers’ emotional responsiveness and feeding responsiveness. The mothers of 137 children between 2 and 6 years of age reported on their responses to children’s negative emotions using the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale and on their feeding practices using the Comprehensive Feeding Practices Questionnaire. The results showed that mothers’ supportive emotion responses (e.g., problem-focused, emotion-focused, and expressive encouragement reactions) tend to be positively associated with responsive feeding practices (e.g., encouraging, modelling, and teaching healthy food-related behaviors). Instead, mothers’ unsupportive responses (e.g., distress, punitive and minimization reactions) tend to be positively associated with nonresponsive feeding practices (e.g., food as reward or to regulate emotions, and pressure to eat) and negatively associated with responsive feeding practices. Our results suggest that emotional and feeding responsiveness may be intertwined and that differences in parent’s emotional responsiveness may translate into differences in their feeding styles, setting the stage for parents’ use of positive vs. negative feeding practices.
Highlights
Parents are powerful socialization agents of children’s emotions and eating behavior
When we analyzed parents’ social demographics associations with Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES) and CFPQ, we found that older mothers tended no to use food as reward (r = −0.22, p < 0.001); there was no other association regarding mothers’ or fathers’ age
Analyzing the positive composite of parents’ reactions, we found that the more the parents used positive reactions, the more they promoted healthy and varied food consumption (r = 0.48, p < 0.001) and the more enthusiastic they were about demonstrating healthy eating (r = 0.32, p < 0.001) or using didactic techniques to encourage the child’s intake of healthy foods (r = 0.41, p < 0.001)
Summary
Parents are powerful socialization agents of children’s emotions and eating behavior They influence children’s self-regulation of emotions through their emotion regulation strategies [1] and their self-regulation of energy intake through their feeding practices [2]. Looking at how parents support children’s emotion regulation could provide insights about the developmental processes by which caregivers shape children’s self-regulation of intake [3]. Difficulties at this level could translate into children’s less effective emotion regulation (i.e., emotion dysregulation) and self-regulation of energy intake, which represent risk factors for childhood obesity [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Despite empirical and practical relevance, only a few empirical studies addressed the relation between responses to children’s emotions and feeding in the parenting context
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