A study shows that pushing or restricting food to your children is not a good idea as reported in Web Md. Research finds that parents of overweight kids are more likely to restrict children's food intake while parents are more likely to pressure children to eat more when they are of normal weight.
However, according to Jerica Berge, neither pushing food nor restricting it is a good idea. The associate professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis added, "Prior research has shown that they may have unintended effects such as a child becoming overweight or obese, or engaging in eating behaviours such as bingeing or purging". Several illnesses are linked to childhood obesity such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
The researchers analyzed results from two studies of kids' food consumption in 2010. More than 2,200 teens whose average age was 14 participated along with 3,252 parents. Most of them are mothers which comprise 63% of the population of parents. On average, they are aged 43 years old.
"When parents and adolescents were both overweight or obese, parents were more likely to restrict food from their adolescents," Berge said. "When parents and adolescents were both normal weight, parents were more likely to pressure their adolescents to eat more."
The findings of the study may help heath care providers determine which among the parents and children may be at risk for poor eating habits.
However Laura Hubbs-Tait, stated that more research is needed to confirm link between parents' weight and their behaviour towards their children's eating habit. Laura Hubbs-Tait is a human development professor and parenting specialist at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. "Many parents may not be aware that their efforts to control their children's eating harm their children's ability to regulate their eating on their own," she said. Although she admitted that the findings of the research is valid and useful. "Parents should be helping children learn how to regulate their own eating, helping them learn to make good food and physical activity choices, and providing lots of encouragement and support when they do so", she advised later on.
"It is more helpful for parents to make sure there are a variety of healthy options in the home or on the table for children to eat, and then allow the child to decide how much they eat," Berge added. "It is also important to continue offering food because it can take numerous exposures to a food before a child will eat it."
Parents who are worried about a child's food intake should talk to a physician, she said.
