Food Parenting Practices and Obstacles: What are Parents of Preschool Children doing to promote their Child’s Healthy Eating?

Background: Eating habits develop early in childhood, and tend to persist into adulthood. Parents play a key role in the development of children`s eating habits. Although most parents are motivated to help their young children eat a healthy diet, their parenting food practices and the perception of barriers may undermine the reaching of these goals. As such, it is critical to develop comprehensive and culturally valid measures of these critical dimensions of food parenting.

Objective: A sequence of two studies aimed to identify food parenting practices and obstacles most reported by parents of Portuguese preschool children, and to develop two validated and culturally adequate questionnaires to be used in future intervention studies.

Methods: Firstly, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 12 mothers of preschool children. Interviews were recorded and transcribed and its contents analyzed according to Thematic Analysis. Secondly, two questionnaires were developed, based on the interview results, relevant literature and previous food parenting instruments; 200 parents of 2 to 6 years old children filled the questionnaire online.

Results: Parenting practices included items related to restriction, pressure to eat, food as reward, permissiveness, restriction of junk food, encouraging fruits and vegetables intake, modeling, negotiation, and self-regulation strategies. Barriers were related to the child’s characteristics, parent’s characteristics and the context. Two instruments were developed and tested, showing good psychometric properties. Parents of preschool children reported using simultaneously food effective and ineffective parenting practices. Parents reported using more often modeling and self-regulation promotion but also restriction. All barriers were considered moderately important with parent-related barriers considered more important.

Conclusion: Results point to the relevance of advancing our understanding of parenting food practices and difficulties to better tailor preventive interventions to promote healthy eating habits during early childhood.