Parental feeding practices predict authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting styles

Abstract

Background: Our goal was to identify how parental feeding practices from the nutrition literature link to general parenting styles from the child development literature to understand how to target parenting practices to increase effectiveness of interventions. Stand-alone parental feeding practices could be targeted independently. However, parental feeding practices linked to parenting styles require interventions treating underlying family dynamics as a whole.

Objective: To predict parenting styles from feeding practices and to test three hypotheses: restriction and pressure to eat are positively related whereas responsibility, monitoring, modeling, and encouraging are negatively related to an authoritarian parenting style; responsibility, monitoring, modeling, and encouraging are positively related whereas restriction and pressure to eat are negatively related to an authoritative parenting style; a permissive parenting style is negatively linked with all six feeding practices.

Design: Baseline data of a randomized-controlled intervention study.

Subjects/setting: Two hundred thirty-nine parents (93.5% mothers) of first-grade children (134 boys, 105 girls) enrolled in rural public schools.

Measures: Parental responses to encouraging and modeling questionnaires and the Child Feeding Questionnaire, as well as parenting styles measured by the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire.

Statistical analyses: Correlation and regression analyses.

Results: Feeding practices explained 21%, 15%, and 8% of the variance in authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting, respectively. Restriction, pressure to eat, and monitoring (negative) significantly predicted an authoritarian style (Hypothesis 1); responsibility, restriction (negative), monitoring, and modeling predicted an authoritative style (Hypothesis 2); and modeling (negative) and restriction significantly predicted a permissive style (Hypothesis 3).

Conclusions: Parental feeding practices with young children predict general parenting styles. Interventions that fail to address underlying parenting styles are not likely to be successful.