Eating attitudes in young teenage girls: Parental management of “fussy” eating

Abstract

A large number of young children are “fussy” about their eating, refusing particular foods. Several behavioral programs have been advanced for making those foods more desirable. However, these programs ignore the function that this fussiness can serve for the child. Children may refuse food as a way of asserting some control over their environment—for example, by changing their parents behavior. It is also not clear to what extent parental efforts to change children's eating patterns may lead to later difficulties associated with eating. This retrospective study examined the possibility that parents' use of behavioral approaches to food refusal might be related to the child's general food fussiness. Associations between recalled parental behaviors, child fussiness, and the child's eating behavior were examined in considering possible causation. In a sample of 92 teenage girls, it was found that positive and negative reinforcement were ineffective, while early reported use of modeling was related to the children's being mted as more fussy in later childhood. Food fissiness showed some association with eating patterns measured by the Bulimic Inueat@tory Test, supporting the clinical utility of investigating “ffirsJiness.” This outcome suggests that food fusiness should be treated not in isolation but in the context of family relations, and that parents should be aduised accordingly. Such treatment of fissiness may play an important role in the development of adult eatingpsychopathology.