Poster #105 - Parenting and Child Temperament Predicts Chinese Preschoolers’ Emotional Eating Behaviors

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Health, Growth, Injury

Integrative Statement

Preschool period is critical to foster positive eating habits, and both parenting and child temperament shape young children’s eating behaviors (Frankel et al., 2012). Authoritarian parents lack of responsiveness to children’s satiety cues, paired with demandingness, might be detrimental to children’s self-regulation of emotions and energy intake (Frankel et al., 2012). Specifically, parents’ controlling feeding practices, such as pressuring their child to eat, are associated with higher risk for unhealthy eating in young children (Zhou et al., 2018). Although the authoritarian parenting style has been shown to be associated with more controlling feeding practices, findings regarding the underlying processes among authoritarian style, controlling feeding practices and children’s eating behaviors remain inconsistent (Brann & Skinner, 2005). Moreover, children with higher temperamental effortful control (better regulation) have more pleasurable eating/food-related interactions with their parents (Hughes & Shewchuk, 2012), but children with lower self-regulation may be more vulnerable to emotional eating (Pieper & Laugero, 2013). Therefore, we examined the mediating role of pressuring to eat in the association between authoritarian parenting style and child emotional eating, and if child effortful control moderates the association between pressuring to eat and child emotional eating.
Chinese mothers (n = 143; M = 36.43 years old, SD = 3.63) with preschoolers (M = 5.06 years old, SD = 0.51) residing in Beijing, China, rated their authoritarian parenting style (Robinson et al., 2001), frequency of pressuring to eat (Birch et al., 2001), child effortful control (Rothbart et al., 2001) and emotional eating (Shang, 2013). Children’s weight and height were measured by school nurse (MBMI = 15.60, SD = 1.94). Based on 2006 WHO guidelines, 12% children were underweight (BMI percentile ≤ 15th percentile), 68.7% were normal weight (BMI percentile: 16th-85th percentile), and 19.3% were overweight (BMI percentile ≥ 86th percentile).
SPSS 24 PROCESS Macro (Hayes, 2012) was used to test the moderated mediation model, and child BMI was controlled as a covariate. The partial moderated-mediation model was found, R2 = 0.21, F(5,125) = 8.19, p < .001 (see Figure 1). The direct effect of authoritarian parenting style on child emotional eating was c’ = 0.18, t = 1.98, p = .05. Conditional indirect effects were tested through bootstrapping 5000 samples (Preacher, Rucker, & Hayes, 2007). Specifically, only when child effortful control was at low and mean levels, authoritarian parenting style was indirectly associated with child emotional eating through pressuring to eat practices (see Table 1).
Our findings contributed to the literature by illustrating potential underlying mechanisms among parenting, child temperament and child eating. Greater authoritarian parenting style escalated parents’ use of coercive feeding, which in turn was associated with children’s emotional eating behaviors. However, this was true only when mothers perceived children obtaining low and moderate levels of self-regulatory capacity, indicating child’s own temperamental effortful control as a potential protective factor in the controlling parent-child food-related interactions. Interestingly, authoritarian parenting had a remaining positive direct effect on child emotional eating. Implications for providing parental guidance to foster adaptive parenting styles in urban Chinese parents are discussed.

Author

• Nan Zhou, Capital Normal University
  Presenting Author