Children’s emotional climate at mealtimes may lead to healthier food choices

A study published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology examines what drives the mealtime emotional climate, how it affects a child’s food choices, and offers practices that may improve the emotional climate around the dinner table. The researchers suggest that having more frequent mealtimes together may be linked to greater healthy food consumption and lower risk for children of being overweight.

For the study, parents of preschoolers, who were participating in the STRONG Kids study, completed two questionnaires about mealtimes over 20–23 months, at about aged 3 and 5. In between that time, a home visit to observe a family mealtime was completed.

From the mealtime observation, researchers used observational coding schemes to count the number of times moms and kids expressed positive and negative emotions. They then combined those observations to look at the ratio of positive to total emotions and negative to total emotions for both moms and kids.

“What we found was that there were two groups of families. We had families where moms were expressing a lot of positive emotion and very little relative negative emotion, and those were our ‘positive expressers,’” said Jaclyn Saltzman, a doctoral candidate in the Dept. of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois. “The other group was our ‘all expressers’ where moms were expressing about the same amount of positive and negative emotions.”

The researchers found that families with more positive emotions during the mealtime had children who ate about one serving, on average, more of healthy food—fruits, vegetables, and soy-protein products—than the “all expressers.” Next, the researchers wanted to see how feeding practices were related to mealtime emotional climates.

Saltzman explained that some feeding practices—behaviors parents use when they feed their children—did come into play. They found that when parents involved their children in grocery shopping, meal planning, or meal preparation, the children had mealtimes that were a little more positive.

Although the study only focused on mothers, Saltzman said she would like to replicate the study and include fathers and other family members to see their impact on the mealtime climate, as well.

Study