“Finish What's on Your Plate!”: The Relationships between Parenting, Children's Nutrition and Outcomes

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing level of concern about children's behaviour and emotional well-being in Western developed countries, in particular the United Kingdom. This has given rise to a plethora of parenting programmes and increasing attention to children's nutrition. These developments are rooted partly in evidence that some parenting interventions improve child outcomes and that what children eat has some effect on how they behave and how they feel about themselves and life in general. However, the two—parenting and nutrition—are rarely linked in services. Yet it is reasonable to suppose that parenting behaviour exerts its effect on child outcomes in part through the mechanism of what parents feed their children and other ways in which they influence their children's food intake. If this is true, it follows that interventions could usefully target the parental “feeding style” as a means of improving child outcomes. This article first portrays the difficulties in defining the concepts involved. It then sets out key findings from the literature on the respective relationships between parenting and outcomes, nutrition and outcomes and, in more depth, parenting and nutrition. It also proposes a conceptual framework to help understand how parents shape children's nutrition. The article argues that while there is good reason to suppose that parenting has an impact on children's nutrition, and that policy and practice should take this into account, more research is needed into the underlying mechanisms through which this relationship operates and into which factors moderate it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Whear

Rebecca Whear is a Researcher at the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford

Nick Axford

Nick Axford is Researcher at Dartington Social Research Unit