Child nutrition can be an anxious subject for some parents. Parents may worry about whether their child is eating enough good food, and wonder about overeating or health. These concerns can sometimes lead to parents using feeding strategies such as restricting what their children eat or how much they eat, or putting pressure on their children to eat more or eat less.

Parents play an instrumental role in the development of children’s eating habits through the child feeding strategies they adopt. Some parental strategies are associated with the development of unhealthy child eating habits and excess weight.

Previous studies have shown a relationship between unhelpful parenting practices and parents who have poor psychological health and low levels of satisfaction with their own parenting skills (self-efficacy). These qualities may also be related to the use of unhelpful child feeding practices such as restriction and pressure to eat.

Research can help us understand why parents adopt unhelpful child feeding practices, and how parents can be helped to develop more adaptive child feeding practices. This project aims to examine whether parental characteristics of psychological wellbeing and parental self-efficacy are related to the use of unhelpful child feeding practices.

Data collection
Data for this research project will be collected from three sources: parents attending a brief parenting seminar called Healthy Kids, parents participating in the Looking into Lunchboxes project, and parents from a community sample. This process is being coordinated by research student Sarah Mitchell.

Healthy Kids seminar
The Healthy Kids seminar focuses the promotion of healthy eating and activity habits in children and families and covers the following topics:

• changes in children’s eating and activity habits
• consequences of unhealthy eating and activity habits
• recommendations for children’s eating and activity habits
• strategies parents can use to promote healthy lifestyle habits
• accessing more information and support. 

Future directions
The implications of this research are far-reaching and include parent-based interventions focused on increasing parental psychological wellbeing and self-efficacy to help parents to adopt more positive behaviours that encourage beneficial attitudes to eating and good health. These interventions would be aimed at reducing child obesity and would include a component focused on increasing parental strategies.