The ways parents or caregivers interact with children around mealtimes can have unintended consequences, according to a new report in the Journal of Adolescent Health. The study found that teenagers' negative attitudes toward eating — or eating psychopathology — may result from their perceptions of their parents' attitudes about food.
Most parents have the best intentions and want their child to be healthy. As a result, they may inadvertently encourage or pressure that child to eat more food than he or she wants to, or to consume a particular type of food the child doesn't want, said lead author Emma Haycraft, Ph.D., of the Centre for Research into Eating Disorders at Loughborough University in Leicestershire, U.K.
Eating disorders are most likely to manifest during the teenage years, Haycraft said, "a time of developing autonomy." When a parent attempts to control his or her child's eating, a child may then try to regain self-control of eating by not eating other food or starting to binge eat, she said.
For the study, more than 500 boys and girls ages 13 to 15 self-reported measures of eating psychopathology, their parents' current feeding practices, and their own height and weight.
"For both boys and girls, parental involvement was related to lower eating disorder symptomatology [the combined symptoms of a disease], while excessive control was related to higher eating disorder symptomatology. This suggests that parents should be involved in making sure their adolescents are eating the right types of foods, but that they should avoid telling their adolescents how much they should eat," said Shayla C. Holub, Ph.D., and associate professor of psychology at the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Source: MedicalXpress
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-10-parents-role-teen-disorders.html