Gender shapes how children react to cutting out unhealthy foods

Mums who stop their children eating sweets and unhealthy snacks make their daughters want to eat more of those foods when they get the chance, a study has found.

Mums who stop their children eating sweets and unhealthy snacks make their daughters want to eat more of those foods when they get the chance, a study has found.

However, cutting out bad food doesn’t have the same effect on boys.

The Flinders University study of 213 children aged 3-5 looked at the implications of three mothers’ feeding styles.

These are restricting bad food through direct comments to the child, telling the child to eat more healthy food and covert avoidance of bad food through changing the child’s environment.

Tiffany and Daniel Salienko with children Nayla, 3, Aymerik, 9, and Taylan, 6. Picture: Sarah Matray

Researchers, led by Samantha Boots, found restrictive feeding led to kids preferring unhealthy food and wanting to eat more of it, which could interfere with their ability to control their eating.

Restrictive feeding strategies include telling children they are not allowed to eat sweets, or allowing them to only eat a certain amount of sweets and snacks.

“Girls respond to restrictive feeding by consuming relatively more snack foods when they become freely available,” Dr Boots and her team report in Appetite journal.

Dr Boots, from the school of psychology, said girls rather than boys reacted that way, possibly reflecting society’s pressure on girls to be thin.

Other studies show a more successful feeding style is management of the child’s environment by “avoiding buying or having sweets or crisps in the home and avoiding visiting restaurants and cafes that serve unhealthy foods,” Dr Boots said.

The study found girls responded to restrictive feeding by consuming relatively more snack foods when they became freely available.

She said this strategy was not “readily detected by the child and therefore not interpreted by them as deprivation of certain foods”.

Researchers also looked at mothers who pressured children to eat by insisting they eat all the food on their plates.

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They found boys brought up this way were less likely to eat when they were not hungry but it did not have an effect on girls.

The findings come as 20 to 25 per cent of Australian preschool children aged three to five are overweight or obese.

Tiffany Salienko said her children, Aymerik, 9, Taylan, 6, and Nayla, 3, were allowed desserts, sugary sweets and juice, but there were limits to how much and when.

“They crave sweets at snack time,” she said.

“Biscuits and snacks like Oreos and Tiny Teddies are only allowed in the late morning or early afternoon. Definitely not after dinner.”

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