New research suggests parental relationships could affect the risk of obesity in children.
"If your mother regularly punished or dismissed your anger, anxiety, or sadness instead of being sensitive to your distress and giving you strategies for handling those feelings, you may be insecurely attached and parenting your children in the same way. A child who doesn't learn to regulate his emotions may in turn develop eating patterns that put him at risk for obesity," Kelly Bost, a professor of human development and family studies, said in a University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences news release.
The team looked at links between a parent's insecure attachment the child's consumption of junk food.
"We wanted to discover the steps that connect attachment and obesity. Scientists know that a person's attachment style is consistently related to the way he responds to negative emotions, and we thought that response might be related to three practices that we know are related to obesity: emotion-related feeding styles, including feeding to comfort or soothe; mealtime routine; and television viewing," Bost said.
Secure attachments are believed to be formed when caregivers are "available and responsive." When this security is not formed children can develop feelings of insecurity and anxiety.
The research team looked at 497 primary caregivers of children between the ages of two-and-half and three-and-a-half. The subjects were surveyed on their parenting style and relationship with their children.
"The study found that insecure parents were significantly more likely to respond to their children's distress by becoming distressed themselves or dismissing their child's emotion. For example, if a child went to a birthday party and was upset because of a friend's comment there, a dismissive parent might tell the child not to be sad, to forget about it. Or the parent might even say: Stop crying and acting like a baby or you're never going over again," Bost said.
The team found a strong link between punishment or dismissal of children's sad or angry feelings to an increase in comfort eating and television watching. The researchers also found that it was not helpful to encourage children to eat all of the food they were given.
"In fighting childhood obesity, one of the most important lessons we can teach children is to eat when they're hungry and recognize when they're full. We want to encourage children to respond to their internal cues and encourage parents not to promote eating under stress or eating to soothe," Bost said.
