A new University of Illinois study finds that insecure attachment between a parent and child can lead to that child developing obesity by resorting to emotional eating.
“If your mother regularly punished or dismissed your anger, anxiety or sadness instead of being sensitive to your distress and giving you strategies for handling those feelings, you may be insecurely attached and parenting your children in the same way,” said Kelly Bost, a U of I professor of human development and family studies in a story from The Rock River Times. “A child who doesn’t learn to regulate his emotions may, in turn, develop eating patterns that put him at risk for obesity.”
The study focused on 497 primary caregivers of 2 1/2- to 3 1/2-year-old children who completed a questionnaire gauging adult attachment. They answered 32 questions about the nature of their close relationships and rated themselves on a scale measuring depression and anxiety.
Then parents responded to questions about how they handled their children’s negative emotions and whether they engaged in emotion-related, pressuring feeding styles that predict obesity. They were also asked about the frequency, planning of and communication during family meals, as well as estimated hours of TV viewing every day. The families are part of the university’s STRONG (Synergistic Theory and Research on Obesity and Nutrition Group) Kids program which studies childhood obesity.
“The study found that insecure parents were significantly more likely to respond to their children’s distress by becoming distressed themselves or dismissing their child’s emotion,” Bost said. “For example, if a child went to a birthday party and was upset because of a friend’s comment there, a dismissive parent might tell the child not to be sad, to forget about it. Or, the parent might even say: Stop crying and acting like a baby, or you’re never going over again.”
The study found that the patterns of punishing or dismissing a child’s sad or angry emotions was not significantly related only to comfort feeding, but also to fewer family meals and more TV watching, which can lead to a child’s unhealthy eating, including sugary drinks, fast food and snacks.
