Children, Parents and Food

Examines aspects of the child′s early experience with food and eating in order to reveal how these experiences shape children′s food acceptance patterns. The transition from suckling to consuming an omnivorous diet is critical to the child′s growth and health. Despite the necessity of a varied diet, children do not readily accept new foods, and are often very neophobic. Repeated experience is necessary to transform the initial neophobic response. The social contexts and physiological consequences of eating also shape children′s food acceptance patterns through associative conditioning, in which foods′sensory cues are associated with the contexts and consequences of ingestion. Children are responsive to the energy density of foods and can adjust intake based on foods′ energy density. Such responsiveness is easily disrupted when parents employ child‐feeding tactics to control what and how much children will eat. Limited evidence suggests that such child‐feeding practices may focus the child away from hunger and satiety, impeding the development of internal controls of food intake in children.