Download or read book Child's Influence on Parental Meal Decisions in the Home written by Emma Irene Studer-Perez and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1 in 5 children in the United States are considered obese (CDC, 2020). Obesity has numerous negative psychological (e.g., anxiety, depression; Rankin et al., 2016) and physical (e.g., diabetes, high blood pressure) consequences and can be predicted in part by poor food choice (Deckelbaum & Williams, 2001). Parents have some control over what their children eat. In addition, children have significant power to affect what food their parents buy and serve. Pester power, where the child begs for highly palatable or preferred foods has been studied extensively in the grocery store (Isler et al., 1987). Additionally, children have over half of the decision-making power over where to eat dinner when eating outside the home and have more responsibility over what they eat in restaurants compared to when in the home (Castro et al., 2016; Kasparian et al., 2017). However, there is no research to date that investigates children's influence on meal decisions when eating in the home. Therefore, this study aimed to examine differences between meals selected by the parent alone and by the parent with the child, and to explore what external factors affect the influence the child has on the bidirectional relationship. Seventy-nine parent-child dyads from the Midwest United States completed the study. Overall, results indicated that children are more in control of the feeding relationship than the parents. When choosing foods together, foods contained more calories, sodium, fat, sugar and less fiber than what the parents chose for the family. Protein was the sole nutrient with a significant discrepancy between foods chosen together and the child's selections alone. In addition, parents chose foods that are considered "unhealthier" when they selected for themselves and their spouses than when selecting for the family with special attention to the child that participated. The external variables tested (i.e., perceived daily stress, the structure of family meals, problematic child mealtime behaviors, parental concern about a child's diet, spousal stress related to child mealtime behaviors, influence of child's food preferences on what other family members eat, food choice preferences, meal decision fatigue, and child involvement in meals) did not significantly affect the discrepancies between the conditions. Future research should consider intrapersonal variables, such as daily variations of stressful life events, time to prepare meals, parenting style, and child behavior to better understand pester power. This study is limited because of its cross-sectional nature and online setting. Future studies should implement ecological momentary assessment and examine regional and cultural factors to fully understand how this relationship functions in daily life and in diverse samples.