The New York Times reported that Social Science and Medicine recently published a study of just over 5,000 parents and their kids in the U.S. It found that kids’ diets do not closely mirror their parents and oftentimes they are eating more poorly. As the Times reported, “This suggests that parents don’t play as large a role as people have thought in their children’s diet,” said a co-author of the study, Dr. Youfa Wang, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Most parents are not doing as good a job as they should.” The study, which strangely uses old data from 1994-1996, concludes that, “Factors other than parental eating behaviors seem to play an important role in affecting American young people’s dietary intake.”
This finding seems suspect to me. While there are parents who don’t even bother to try and get their kid to eat fruits, veggies and other healthy foods, there is a large and growing movement afoot; in every economic class and every location in the country, parents are being models of good eating, and teaching (nay, insisting) their kids to eat healthy foods. Teaching children that their bodies are their own temples should start as early as 2, when kids can comprehend basic good vs. bad. Hopefully, this study is flawed. What do you think? Are kids diets getting better or worse?
Interesting article! I imagine a number of my clients and their families would benefit from checking this out.