The relationship between children's food preferences and those of their parents

Abstract

Food preferences were obtained directly from 128 preschool children and their parents, using four different sets of foods: fruits, vegetables, sandwiches, and snacks. When the rank orders of preferences given by the children were correlated with those of their parents, only 10% of the mother-child and 6% of the father-child correlations were significant at the p < 0.05 level. In comparison, when children's preferences were correlated with those of unrelated adults, 8% of the obtained values were significant. These results indicate that if several methodological problems are eliminated which have frequently been present in studies on the relationship between parental preferences and those of their children, parental preferences are no more strongly related to their children's preferences than are the preferences of unrelated adults of the same subcultural group. The majority of the correlations for mother-child pairs, father-child pairs, and unrelated adult-child pairs were positive; and the three distributions of correlations were very similar. These results suggest that a commonality of food preference may exist within a subcultural group and that the commonality is reflected in the low positive correlations consistently noted between children's preferences and those of their parents.