Association Between Parental Feeding Style and Childhood Eating Habit

Introduction

“Associations between Parental Feeding Styles and Childhood Eating Habits: A Survey of Hong Kong Pre-School Children” written by Kenneth Lo, Calvin Cheung, Albert Lee, Wilson W. S. Tam and Vera Keung, mentioned that childhood obesity is a global public health issue. The number of overweight children has increased dramatically over the past three decades, and pre-school children are dependent on parents. Therefore, parental feeding style may affect childhood eating habits. They have conducted a survey of Hong Kong pre-school student to assess the influence of parental feeding styles on children's dietary patterns.

The study has proved the relationship between parental feeding styles and pre-school childhood dietary behavior. The study also found that parents were more likely to implement ‘control over eating’. In this feeding style, more children consumed the recommended intake of fruits, breakfast and vegetables and reduce the consumption of dairy and high-energy-density foods (high-ED foods) which means the food provide more energy per gram of food and have a low water content and high in fat(British Nutrition Foundation).

I agree that parental feeding style will affect children eating habit and their health. Children’s dietary intakes will be affected by different parental feeding style. For example, ‘Control over eating’ parental feeding styles may affect the pre-school children’s eating habit from early childhood. It was correlated with higher chance of consuming fruits and vegetables also a lower chance of skipping breakfast. The parental feeding style may be one of the factors that affect children’s weight. Therefore, we will discuss how do different feeding styles affect the children weight, nutrition requirements during childhood, the cause and prevention of obesity. This essay will first discuss the main message of author to the reader and then explain the relevance of the journal article to the course.

Main message of authors

The main messages to the reader are that the four types of parental feeding styles are associated with childhood eating behavior and each of feeding styles has a different impact on children’s eating behavior and. There are four types of parental feeding style mentioned in the article which are “control over eating” (controlling the types and quantities of food that children should consume, “Prompting and encouragement” (encourage children to consume different kind of foods, “instrumental feeding” (feeding children as a result of their behavior) and “emotional” (feeding children according to their emotion). To further explain, emotional and instrumental feeding was associated with unhealthy eating habit, because parents may use high-ED food such as candy, chocolates, cake and tart as reward for children’s behavior so that