Promotion and Prevention Focused Feeding Strategies: Exploring the Effects on Healthy and Unhealthy Child Eating.

Elisabeth L Melbye,Håvard Hansen

doi:10.1155/2015/306306

Abstract

There is a general lack of research addressing the motivations behind parental use of various feeding practices. Therefore, the present work aims to extend the current literature on parent-child feeding interactions by integrating the traditional developmental psychological perspective on feeding practices with elements of Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT) derived from the field of motivational psychology. In this paper, we seek to explain associations between parental feeding practices and child (un)healthy eating behaviors by categorizing parental feeding practices into promotion and prevention focused strategies, thus exploring parent-child feeding interactions within the framework of RFT. Our analyses partly supported the idea that (1) child healthy eating is positively associated with feeding practices characterized as promotion focused, and (2) child unhealthy eating is negatively associated with feeding practices characterized as prevention focused. However, a general observation following from our results suggests that parents' major driving forces behind reducing children's consumption of unhealthy food items and increasing their consumption of healthy food items are strategies that motivate rather than restrict. In particular, parents' provision of a healthy home food environment seems to be essential for child eating.

Highlights

To both nutritionists and consumer researchers, it seems obvious that parents play an important role in child eating
Parents’ survey packages including information letters, consent forms, and self-administered questionnaires were distributed to the children at school with instructions to bring them home to be completed by one of their parents
The general lack of research addressing motivations behind parental use of various feeding practices was the impetus of the present work, where a traditional perspective on feeding practices obtained from the child feeding literature was integrated with a new, supplementary perspective obtained from motivational psychology

Summary

Introduction

To both nutritionists and consumer researchers, it seems obvious that parents play an important role in child eating They influence their children’s diet and eating behaviors in many different ways, especially through their food-related parenting practices, or so-called feeding practices, which are specific techniques and behaviors used by parents to influence children’s food intake [1, 2]. Authoritarian feeding is characterized by parental control of child eating behaviors with little regard for the child’s preferences and choices. This strictly regulatory style includes behaviors such as restricting certain foods (e.g., sweets and desserts) and forcing the child to eat other foods (e.g., vegetables). Permissive feeding provides little or no structure and control, and the child’s food choices are limited only by what is available [2]

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