In April, the C.S. Mott National Poll on Children’s Health released a report on the struggle of ensuring kids eat a healthy diet and the benefits and drawbacks of many common household meal-time practices. The report is based on responses from 1,083 parents with at least one child aged 3-10.
The poll’s questions focused on which diets parents consider healthy, which diets they have implemented, foods parents avoid or seek out while grocery shopping, strategies to make children eat fruit and vegetables and portion sizes.
Rackham student Aria Grabowski, who studies nutritional epidemiology, told The Michigan Daily in an interview food aversions and preferences start extremely early in life, making infancy a crucial time to establish healthy eating habits.
“Food aversion is actually a very normal behavior, you know, children instinctively want to make sure it’s safe, they want to make sure it’s okay,” Grabowski said. “But we do see it to be lowest amongst infants. So, infants are most likely to try a new food and (enjoy it) and then that kind of carries with them for the rest of their life. So, it’s really important to establish those eating patterns, establish those foods that they like, in that window of infancy.”
Grabowski explained how, at a certain age, societal pressures begin to impact a person’s natural bodily cues surrounding hunger and satiety.
“The other key thing to think about with this is children have an innate sense of hunger,” Grabowski said. “So, they know when they’re hungry. They know when they’re full. They really are in tune to that. This starts to decline around age nine, actually; societal pressures of like, ‘oh, this looks really good, oh, my friends are eating this, oh, I want that’ – that kind of starts to come into play at that point. So by introducing healthy habits earlier on, we can then give the children the tools that they need to navigate those pressures that they face later in life and take that with them.”
The poll found that one in eight parents make children eat all of the food on their plates. Susan Woolford, co-director of the National Poll on Children’s Health, described in an interview with The Daily the consequences of parents doing this.
“We want children, and adults for that matter, to be able to notice their bodies’ cues and to be able to tell when they are full or when they need more, and to listen to those cues,” Woolford said. “So, if we force children to finish their plate, for example, they may eat beyond the point at which they are full. This could set up poor eating practices, and can lead to things like overconsumption and ultimately, to excess weight.”
According to the poll, 61% of parents say they would make something different for their child if they didn’t like what the rest of the family ate. Woolford explained how this can be detrimental in the long term.
“I think that that is concerning, because typically, when parents make a substitute that the child prefers, it is generally not as healthy as the option that was being provided for the rest of them,” Woolford said. “And so in that case, parents often do that as well because they’re concerned that if the kid gets the meal, they won’t get the nutrients that they need. But by providing a less healthy substitute, the child really isn’t getting the nutrients they need.”
The poll additionally found that 19% of parents would offer rewards to children for finishing vegetables. Kate Bauer, associate professor of nutritional sciences in the School of Public Health, described the negative effects of this trend .
“Sweets are naturally, evolutionarily, very attractive,” Bauer said. “So, that is going to override that kid’s sense of fullness, right? I mean, we all do this like ‘Oh, actually, I can have a bit of dessert’. And that’s fine, but when it happens over and over, the kid starts to turn off that attention to their own hunger cues and is dependent much more on external cues like, ‘Did my mom offer me something? Did the ice cream truck just drive by?’ We sort of lose that internal sense of hunger and fullness.”
Bauer also said there are pressures on parents from all angles to be perfect, especially around their child’s health and nutrition. She said social media plays a large role in this stress because people are able to curate how their family life is perceived.
“I think parents do really stress, especially once you have the time and ability to stress,” Bauer said. “It’s this double-edged sword like ‘oh, yeah, your child your toddler’s eating is really important.’ And then parents freak out that their kid is not this amazing eater and eating the rainbow and a lot of this is on social media, too. You know, it’s not just teens that are exposed to social media. There are these moms with gorgeous houses and gorgeous meals and, and I think, you know, again, once parents have the basic resources to be able to feed their kids, a lot of the stress is societally imposed.”
Bauer emphasized there are many greater socioeconomic reasons for which many parents can have a lowered ability to establish healthy eating habits in their families.
“When we look at how lower-income communities have worse diets, I do not blame those parents,” Bauer said. “It could be that they don’t have grocery stores near them, or they are working two jobs and don’t have time to cook, or with regards to prices of food, processed food is much cheaper and much more time-efficient.”
Daily News Reporter Greta Fear can be reached at gcfear@umich.edu.
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