Wondering how to encourage healthy relationships with food in children? Lead by example. A study suggests that when parents stick to their commitment to a balanced diet, they are more likely to eat and feed healthily, which will foster healthy eating habits in children.

Children are significantly influenced by their parents' eating behaviors, especially in terms of developing habits of either avid or avoidant eating, the study published in the journal Appetite revealed.

"Parents are a key influence in children's eating behavior but equally, parents have the perfect opportunity to encourage a balanced diet and healthy eating from a young age in their children. Therefore, it is important to establish how a parent's eating style is associated with their children's eating style and what factors could be modified to encourage healthy relationships with food," Dr. Abigail Pickard, the lead researcher of the study, said in a news release.

Earlier research by the same team had identified four eating behaviors in children aged 3 to 6: typical, avid, emotional, and avoidant eating.

Typical eaters have balanced food behaviors with no extreme tendencies. Avid eaters respond to food cues in their environment and take pleasure in eating. Emotional eaters consume food in response to their emotions, while avoidant eaters are very selective about their food and generally find little enjoyment in eating.

For the latest study, researchers analyzed the same group of 785 parents whose children were analyzed in the previous study. The new study investigated how the four eating behaviors were linked to parents' own eating habits.

The results showed that 41.4% of the sample were typical eaters, 37.3% were avid eaters, 15.7% were emotional eaters, and 5.6 % were avoidant eaters.

"The direct links between child and parent behavior were particularly clear in parents with avid or avoidant eating behaviors, whose children tended to have similar eating behavior," the news release stated.

The researchers observed that when parents with avid or emotional eating styles use food to comfort their children, those children are likely to develop similar eating behaviors. However, when these parents offer a balanced and varied diet, their children are less likely to adopt those same eating habits.

"Feeding practices, such as using food for emotional regulation, providing balanced and varied food, and promoting a healthy home food environment, mediated associations between parent and child eating profiles. The study emphasizes the need for nuanced, tailored interventions to address the intricate relationship between parent and child eating behaviors," the researchers wrote.

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