US Preschoolers' Media Exposure and Dietary Habits: The primacy of television and the limits of parental mediation

Abstract

A potential barrier to healthy eating in childhood is media marketing of obesogenic foods, yet little research has linked young children's media and dietary habits. This study reports data from 423 parents and 354 2- to 4-year-old children in the Midwestern United States, from the first wave of a 3-wave prospective panel study. Variables included family demographics, child media exposure, parent mediation of TV, child dietary habits, and child BMI. Controlling demographics and parent BMI, media exposure and parental mediation were unrelated to child BMI. However, TV viewing predicted increased intake of high-energy, low-nutrient (HELN) foods and decreased intake of fruits and vegetables. Restrictive parental mediation reduced some of these relationships, whereas coviewing and instructive mediation increased others. TV viewing continued to predict intake of some HELN foods for the 322 children whose parents limited their daily screen media exposure to 2 hours. Discussion focuses on future research directions and policy implications.

Keywords:

• children
• diet
• media
• nutrition
• obesity
• television

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the Illinois Council for Food and Agriculture Research and the Illinois Department of Human Services to fund the STRONG Kids Program at the University of Illinois. We wish to thank Dipti Dev, Brenda Koester, Gwen Costa Jacobsohn, and Diane Marlin, along with STRONG Kids team members Barbara Fiese, Kelly Bost, Sharon Donovan, Brent McBride, Diana Grigsby-Toussaint, Juhee Kim, Angela Wiley, and Margarita Teran-Garcia, for extensive feedback and assistance during data collection and entry.

Notes

^1. Restrictive mediation reflects restrictions placed on time spent watching TV. Accordingly, it is negatively correlated with weekly TV exposure. Thus, it might be argued that restrictive mediation should be entered in the regression analyses on its own step, before TV exposure. We ran these analyses and found that TV's predictive power remained unaltered. Moreover, parents may include children's exposure to unrestricted TV (e.g. TV watched with the babysitter or during daycare) in their overall estimates of children's TV viewing. We therefore maintain that it is most appropriate to enter restrictive mediation on the third step of the analyses, after TV exposure.