14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new joint study by Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) scientists, working together with experts from the University of Oslo, mothers who have a lot of negative feelings and emotions are far more likely to give unhealthy food to their children than other moms, not necessarily on purpose, but simply because they do not care. The new paper is a very important first step towards a new way of conducting scientific research, as it is the first one in the world to look at both psychological and sociodemographic variables in the mothers it has analyzed and surveyed.
The investigation team have looked at the behavior and the actions of more than 27,763 mothers in Norway, who have been enlisted in the Mother and Child Cohort Study. All of the participants were asked how often their children ate 36 different types of foods and sweets, by the time they turned 18 months old. At the same time, the women themselves were asked questions about their state of mind and about how they related to the world around them.
The conclusion of the study was that those who proved to be emotionally unstable, anxious, angry, sad, or low on self-confidence were far more likely to give their children more sweets or fatty food than the other ones, by the time the young ones got to be 18 months old. Before they turn 2, the children already learn to distinguish between healthy food and fatty food and to also ask for sweets on their own.
Mothers with a poor view of the world and who experience a lot of negative emotions are also less likely to be in control of their kids, because they have a lowered stress limit, and they give in easily during an argument with their child.
“I think that mothers compensate for this either by trying to force healthy food into their child or hold the sweet-bag strings extra tightly. Paradoxically, they try to balance poor control by actually using more control. With force and restrictions they increase desire, which quickly results in resistance in the form of tantrums which these mothers are also bad at resisting. Also, earlier studies have shown that controlling behavior among parents is linked with a more sugar-rich diet among children,” NIPH psychologist Eivind Ystrom explains.
“People with a lot of negative affectivity often express worry and appear to be helpless and insecure. Research into this type can help to create a toolbox of advice to relieve the feeling of stress and lack of coping and improve the child's diet. Unfortunately, we could not study the fathers, but it is likely that this also applies to them. Men with a lot of negative affectivity often express this in the form of anxiety or anger, but otherwise the characteristics are identical between the sexes,” the expert concludes.