Do parental feeding practices moderate the relationships between impulsivity and eating in children?

Abstract

This study examines the relationships between children's impulsivity, their eating behaviours, and their perceptions of their parent's feeding practices. 153 10–13 year old children completed questionnaires assessing their eating behaviours, their impulsiveness and their perception of their parent's feeding practices. Children's reports of dysfunctional eating behaviours were significantly correlated with their perceptions of their parents feeding practices and with their levels of impulsivity. Children's reports of parental monitoring of their food intake significantly moderated the influence of child impulsiveness upon emotional eating. Children's perceptions of parental monitoring of their food intake may potentially have a protective effect at preventing more impulsive children from eating in response to emotional feelings.

Introduction

People who are impulsive are often more sensitive to, and more likely to approach, rewarding stimuli and they also tend to be worse at inhibiting and controlling their responses to signals, one of which is the tendency to eat. Previous research has found that impulsivity is higher in obese children relative to controls, and particularly in children who binge eat (Braet et al., 2007, Nederkoorn et al., 2006). Impulsivity has also been associated with bulimia nervosa, with binge eating disorder (Fischer, Smith, & Cyders, 2008), and predicts lower weight loss in treatment programmes for obesity (Nederkoorn, Jansen, Mulkens, & Jansen, 2007).

There are a range of environmental and societal influences that will moderate the relationships between a child's personality and their behaviour (e.g. Belsky, 1984). For example, overly-controlling parental feeding practices can disrupt the child's ability to attend to their hunger and satiety (Birch et al., 2003, Farrow and Blissett, 2006). Parental pressure to eat predicts more negative comments about food, greater subsequent refusal of food (Batsell et al., 2002, Galloway et al., 2006), slower weight gain and weight loss in children over time (Faith et al., 2004a, Farrow and Blissett, 2008). Conversely, restricting children's food intake predicts a greater desire to eat restricted food (Fisher & Birch, 1999), eating in the absence of hunger, emotional eating and weight gain in longitudinal research (Birch et al., 2003, Faith et al., 2004a, Galloway et al., 2010). Although the relationships between parental monitoring child food intake and child BMI are mixed (e.g. Brann and Skinner, 2005, Roemmich et al., 2010), monitoring appears to have a protective effect in reducing the likelihood of child overweight and weight gain (Brann and Skinner, 2005, Faith et al., 2004b).

Given that impulsivity is assumed to predict weight gain because impulsive children struggle to control the tendency to overeat, it is quite likely that the relationship between impulsivity and eating would be impacted upon by over-controlling parental feeding practices. Experimental research has found that child food intake can be predicted child impulsivity in interaction with the amount of variety in their food environment: with impulsive children who are exposed to high variety being most susceptible to overeating (Guerrieri, Nederkoorn, & Jansen, 2008). This research aims to extend these findings by exploring whether children's experiences of controlling parental feeding practices interact with their levels of impulsivity in predicting their emotional and external eating. It was hypothesised that more impulsive children who are additionally exposed to greater pressure to eat, greater restriction of food, and to less monitoring of their food intake would be the most likely to report emotional and external eating.