Does Your Parenting Style Affect Your Child’s Nutrition?

This blog post was written in partnership with the Healthy Eating Research (HER), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. HER’s mission is to support and disseminate research on policy, systems, and environmental strategies that promote healthy eating among children and advance nutrition and health equity. I have been compensated for my time and writing. As always, my thoughts and opinions are entirely my own. 

Have you ever wondered…

…whether your parenting style affects your child’s food choices? Parents I work with in my private practice often find themselves asking this question as they navigate food battles, stress around mealtimes, and picky eating behaviors in their kids.

Don’t get me wrong - some garden variety picky eating phases are developmentally normal and tend to come and go throughout childhood no matter our parenting styles, but how we react and parent through these phases can influence whether those behaviors resolve and fade or stick around and strengthen over time. 

If you are struggling to manage picky eating behaviors in your kids, worried about limited food acceptance, or have concerns about the food choices they make, it can help to step back and take a look at how parenting styles might be playing a role.

There are four main “parenting styles,” or sets of attitudes and beliefs that people hold about raising children. Parenting styles set the tone and emotional atmosphere around the day-to-day ways in which we parent, whether we’re bathing, feeding, watching, or playing with our kids, and they reflect both our level of “demandingness of” and “responsiveness to” our children. 

“Demandingness” refers to the degree to which we exert control over our children’s behaviors, while “responsiveness” refers to the extent to which we are sensitive to their emotional and developmental needs. The four types of parenting styles include:

• authoritative (high demandingness, high responsiveness)

• authoritarian (high demandingness, low responsiveness)

• indulgent/permissive (low demandingness, high responsiveness)

• uninvolved/neglectful (low demandingness, low responsiveness) 

Is it clear to you which of the four best characterizes your parenting style? It gets even more interesting when we look at how the four parenting styles are expressed around food and feeding, otherwise known as “feeding styles.” Here are 4 examples according to the latest evidence-based report, “Recommendations for Creating Healthy Eating Habits,” from Healthy Eating Research (HER), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) committed to building a Culture of Health through identifying effective strategies to improve children’s nutrition and prevent childhood obesity:

• Authoritative: actively encourages kids to eat using non-directive behaviors, allows kids to follow their own internal cues for hunger and fullness and to take ownership over the process of eating

• Authoritarian: uses controlling behaviors to impact a child’s eating in an unsupportive way, not responsive to the child’s needs for autonomy and/or internal hunger and fullness cues

• Indulgent: makes few demands on kids to eat, responsive to kids’ hunger and fullness cues and needs for autonomy

• Uninvolved: makes few demands on kids to eat, not responsive to kids’ hunger and fullness cues and needs for autonomy

“Food parenting practices” are the set of actions parents take around feeding that express parents’ feeding styles and are meant to influence what and how their children eat. Examples include allowing kids to choose from within a set of limited food options, requiring a certain number of bites of food, and establishing a regular schedule of meals and snacks. 

Here’s where it gets REALLY interesting (and comforting for parents as well!). It seems that food parenting practices are easier to adjust than overall parenting styles. 

This is good news! I don’t know about you, but when it comes to parenting in general, (and especially when I am frustrated), I often find myself marveling at how something I say to my kids sounds like it could have come right out of my own mother’s mouth. Those parenting patterns run deep and are challenging to change, but if you have concerns about your child’s nutrition and wonder if how you parent around food may be playing a role, it’s reassuring to know that some simple and effective changes to your food parenting practices are well within reach. 

Which food parenting practices are found to be most effective when it comes to improving a child’s eating behaviors? Here’s what you need to know:

• Not Coercive food parenting practices (such as pressuring, cajoling, bribing, and punishing kids to eat) which are generally counterproductive to a child’s development of healthy eating behaviors

• Food parenting practices that provide structure (such as establishing a steady routine of meals and snacks at regular intervals throughout the day, and “closing the kitchen” in between) are thought to support the development of healthy eating behaviors while discouraging unhealthy eating behaviors in kids

• Food parenting practices that foster autonomy (such as encouraging kids to follow their own internal cues for hunger and fullness, and creating a strong division of responsibility between parents and kids, where parents decide what, when and where meals will be served, allowing children to decide whether and how much to eat) are believed to help healthy eating behaviors become ingrained

• Food parenting practices that include verbal praise for healthy food choices are more effective for children under 6

• Structured guidance is more helpful at decreasing unhealthy eating behaviors in kids ages 7 and older

Small adjustments that shift food parenting practices into a more authoritative style can have a positive impact on a child’s nutritional health and long-term relationship with food. Here are some examples of what these shifts can looks like:

• Instead of insisting that a child finish her plate of food (authoritarian), encourage her to check in with her belly before leaving the table, as the kitchen will be closed for a while until the next meal or snack (authoritative)

• Instead of demanding that kids try 2 bites of a new vegetable side or lose out on screen time after dinner (authoritarian), enlist them in the process of choosing and preparing a vegetable side before the meal and then let them decide whether and how much of that vegetable to eat (authoritative)

• Instead of short-order cooking a different meal for a child who refuses to eat what is served (indulgent), serve a variety of new/unfamiliar and familiar/well-liked foods at meals and allow kids to choose for themselves whether and how much to eat (authoritative)

• Instead of allowing kids to graze and snack all day as they please (uninvolved), establish a structured feeding environment where kids have to ask before taking food, and parents provide a dependable routine of meals and snacks that come at regular intervals throughout the day (authoritative)

To learn more about this topic and more, read HER’s latest evidence-based report, “Recommendations for Creating Healthy Eating Habits,” and check out HER’s infant feeding guidelines for infants and young toddlers 0-2;drink guidelines for kids 0-5 and beverage guidelines for kids and adults 5-19+.