Study: Using Food As A Reward Linked To Emotional Overeating For Kids

There are some days when it’s just too tempting to resort to bribery, and food can often be the way to go. Kid refusing to allow themself to get buckled into the car seat? Well, you can have a cookie when we get home. Throwing a temper tantrum in the grocery store? Shhhh, have a snack. But, a new study says that these “coercive food practices” might have unintended effects, resulting in emotional overeating.

Previous research has shown that around the preschool years, emotional undereating — refusing to eat when upset — gives way to emotional overeating, leading researchers from the University of North Florida to look into the environmental factors that might influence such a shift.

Emotional overeating, or eating in response to emotion, can have longterm negative effects, such as unhealthy eating patterns, weight issues and the development of eating disorders.

The study, published in Appetite, explored whether parents’ use of coercive food practices — using food to control their child’s emotions — instead of teaching children strategies for emotional regulation, resulted in emotional overeating.

Researchers recruited 221 mothers of four and five-year-old children through the online survey platforms Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific. Only mothers were included to maintain consistency, as some research suggests fathers’ feeding practices may differ.

The participants were asked to complete a survey, detailing their feeding practices, and their child’s emotional eating behaviors and ability to emotionally regulate.

The researchers assessed for 4 different coercive food practices among the mothers: using food to regulate a child’s emotions, using food as a reward, offering food in emotionally charged situations, and using food to encourage or discourage certain behaviors.

The mothers reported their children’s ability to emotionally regulate using a checklist that recorded how the children expressed their emotions, and their ability to manage the intensity and duration of them. Emotional eating was measured in a questionnaire, where mothers answered whether children tended to eat more or less in response to different scenarios.

The researchers also controlled for general food responsiveness — the tendency to eat when prompted by the sight or smell of food.

The study revealed that all of the assessed coercive food practices by the mothers were correlated with worse emotional regulation in the children, which was then correlated with increased tendencies towards emotional overeating.

While coercive food practices were also linked to emotional undereating, children’s ability to emotional regulate did not affect the tendency to undereat. This suggests that, unlike overeating, undereating is not a learned behavior from parents, and may simply be a more natural stress response.

While the study’s findings suggest an important link between mother’s behaviors and children’s eating tendencies, there were certainly limitations. The study was based on self-reported and short-term data, and a more accurate assessment could be based on observation, and long-term reports. Also, this research focused only on mothers, so future research could be done to see if father’s feeding behaviors have similar effects.

So, the next time a temper tantrum comes along, maybe stick to a non-edible form of bribery.