Can social capital harm? Caregiver mental health, mealtime interactions, and disordered eating among children and adolescents.

• In Event: Children and Youth Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Family Complexity and Transitions to Adulthood

Abstract

Disordered eating (DE) is a growing public health issue among children and adolescents in the US (Pastore et al., 2023; López-Gil et al., 2023; Mentzelou et al., 2025). Disordered eating often happens when moral value is assigned to food or to oneself for eating or not eating something. It is extremely common and normalized through diet culture and societal pressures, but disordered eating can be highly problematic (Baker Dennis, 2024).Previous literature on disordered or emotional eating has shown that family interactions can have a large impact on a child or adolescents’ eating behaviors (Brantley et al., 2022; Stone et al., 2022; Savage et al., 2007 ). Research suggests that children start to learn norms around eating as early as the first month of life (Savage et al., 2007). The way that parents approach and model eating habits affects how their child thinks about and approach eating.Mental health also impacts the way that people think and act and the mental health of a parent has a great influence on those they are interacting with often, like their children (Pierce et al., 2019). Mental health often influences behavior and parental behavior can increase the risk for emotional eating in children according to the most current clinical research (Mentzelou et al., 2025). This paper seeks to understand the relationship between caregiver mental health, social capital measured through mealtime interactions, and disordered eating outcomes for children and adolescents. We use data from the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) which looks into the health- both physical and mental of children aged 0-17 in the United States. Logistic regression will be used to explore these relationships.Preliminary analysis has shown that there are statistically significant interaction effects between caregiver mental health, disordered eating among adolescents, and the frequency of meals eaten together as a family. Further analysis will help us to answer the research question more fully to determine how these phenomena are working together to impact children and families.

Authors

• Kaila Mae Nevarez, Brigham Young University-Provo

• Scott Sais, Brigham Young University-Provo

• Connor Peterson