Gathering to eat together serves as the centerpiece of social interaction for many families. It also can be a source of stress, especially for parents of children still learning healthy eating habits.
Two researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas’ School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) have published the results of two recent studies in the journal Appetite that analyze perceptions and variability of feeding preschool-age children while co-parenting.
Dr. Shayla Holub, psychology department chair, and Dr. Jackie Nelson, associate professor of psychology, are co-authors of both papers. Their findings emphasize the importance of parents collaborating on a unified mealtime strategy, both to help the child develop self-regulation skills — eating the right amount, not too little or too much — and to foster marital harmony.
Reinforcing consistent messages also promotes greater maternal mental health and better child social-emotional adjustment, they said.
“Preschoolers are often picky eaters with high activity levels, making it hard to create structure. Mealtime can be the most stressful part of the day,” Nelson said. “Teamwork helps both the parents and the child. It goes beyond parental relationship quality; it’s also beneficial for the child to see a united front.”
One of the challenges is that each parent may approach mealtime with different philosophies informed by their childhoods.
“We all have our own experiences we take with us,” Holub said. “This makes mealtime a place where conflict can happen; parents must work together.”
Effect of Feeding Practices
In the most recent study, which appears in the Sept. 1 edition of the journal, the psychologists explore the daily variability in mothers’ and fathers’ feeding practices and how that influences children’s eating behaviors. One hundred families with at least one child between 3 and 5 years old completed seven days of daily diaries, which provided a more authentic view of family experiences than a single-day snapshot, the researchers explained.
“These interactions are more variable than previously assumed,” Nelson said. “Mothers’ and fathers’ feeding practices and their reports of their children’s energy regulation and food refusal all varied significantly day to day.”
One important factor in feeding practices is the degree of structure parents provide, which Holub described as “guiding aspects of the meal” — such as location, timing and food content — without controlling how much a child decides to eat.
“Generally, on days when parents provide less structure and use more controlling feeding practices, children refuse food more and have more trouble regulating their eating,” Nelson said.
When both parents’ behaviors were analyzed together, the fathers’ feeding behaviors on a specific day were more predictive of their child’s eating behaviors, whereas the mothers’ tendencies across the week were more predictive of child behavior, speaking to mothers’ greater consistency.
“Teamwork helps both the parents and the child. It goes beyond parental relationship quality; it’s also beneficial for the child to see a united front.”
Dr. Jackie Nelson, associate professor of psychology in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
“Fathers show greater variability in feeding and mealtime support from one day to the next, and what fathers do on any one day tends to relate to the child’s behavior that day,” Holub said. “Fathers engaged in more control, provided less structure and varied more day-to-day in the pressure they used.”
Because mothers’ practices are more stable, their average tendencies were more closely related to their child’s behaviors.
“It’s likely that mothers and children influence each other in complex, transactional ways that require more nuanced analyses and observations to fully understand,” Holub said.
Importance of Parental Unity
An earlier study, published in the Jan. 1, 2022, issue of the journal, focused on parents’ perceptions of the support they receive from their partner in the feeding process, coupled with additional researcher evaluation of video-recorded mealtimes. The same 100 families who participated in the variability study also participated in this study.
“If you have a picky eater, it’s hard to encourage your child to trust their own cues and listen to their body,” Nelson said. “If your partner is providing inconsistent messages, that makes it even harder. That’s the piece that makes this paper valuable.”
When parents do markedly different things in controlling their child’s eating, they don’t feel as supported — mothers, in particular, the researchers found.
“The gender dynamics here are interesting, where moms react to the amount of support they receive more than dads,” Nelson said. “It’s consistent with past research that moms still tend to be more responsible for managing children’s eating than dads.”
“Parents can get too focused on things like, ‘I want my child to eat the broccoli,’ or ‘I want them to try this lasagna I made.’ What we really should want is for our children have a healthy relationship with food.”
Dr. Shayla Holub, psychology department chair in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
The study showed that mothers’ perceptions of being supported at mealtime by their partners were highly related to feeling supported across all parenting contexts — more than for dads.
“Co-parenting support is highly linked to marital satisfaction. When parents feel like they are a team on the same page, they feel more positively about their marriage,” Nelson said. “That feeds into general well-being and mental health, feeling like you’ve got someone in your corner.”
Holub emphasized the importance of parents keeping their sights on long-term objectives.
“Parents can get too focused on things like, ‘I want my child to eat the broccoli,’ or ‘I want them to try this lasagna I made,’” she said. “What we really should want is for our children have a healthy relationship with food, enjoy a wide variety of healthy foods and recognize when they’re hungry or full. These long-term goals likely differ less between parents than the short-term ones.”
Nelson said it is helpful to accept that no matter one’s parenting style, mealtimes are difficult to manage with young children.
“It’s OK to feel that it is challenging for both parents to know what to do and then enact those skills in person,” she said. “It’s particularly important for parents to communicate about their goals and feeding preferences, and then to try as best they can to support each other in that context — for their child, their relationship and their own well-being.”
Both studies were supported by The Lewis Foundation in Dallas.