Predicting preschool children's emotional eating: The role of parents' emotional eating, feeding practices and child temperament



Stone, Rebecca A ORCID: 0000-0002-8910-8792, Blissett, Jacqueline, Haycraft, Emma and Farrow, Claire
(2022) Predicting preschool children's emotional eating: The role of parents' emotional eating, feeding practices and child temperament. MATERNAL AND CHILD NUTRITION, 18 (3). e13341-.

[img] Text
Predicting preschool childrens emotional eating The role of parents emotional eating, feeding practices and child temperamen.pdf - Open Access published version

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Emotional eating (EE; defined as overeating irrespective of satiety and in response to emotional states) develops within childhood, persists into adulthood, and is linked with obesity. The origins of EE remain unclear, but parental behaviours (e.g., controlling feeding practices and modelling) and child characteristics (e.g., temperament) are often implicated. To date, the interaction between these influences has not been well investigated. This study explores whether the relationship between parent and child EE is shaped by parental feeding practices, and if the magnitude of this relationship varies as a function of child temperament. Mothers (N = 244) of 3-5-year-olds completed questionnaires about their EE, feeding practices, their children's EE and temperament. Results showed that parental use of food to regulate children's emotions fully mediated the relationship between parent and child EE, and using food as a reward and restricting food for health reasons partially mediated this relationship. Analyses demonstrated that the mediated relationship between parent and child EE via use of food as a reward and restriction of food for health reasons varied as a function of child negative affect, where high child negative affect moderated these mediations. These findings suggest child EE may result from interrelationships between greater parent EE, use of food as a reward, restriction of food for health reasons and negative affective temperaments, but that greater use of food for emotion regulation may predict greater child EE irrespective of child temperament.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: child feeding, childhood obesity, family influences, parenting, parent, quantitative methods
Divisions: Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences > Institute of Population Health
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 16 Apr 2024 14:56
Last Modified: 16 Apr 2024 14:56
DOI: 10.1111/mcn.13341
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3180377