# Seeing Food Through Young Children’s Eyes: Children’s Representations of Parental Feeding Strategies and Food Choice Reasoning

## TL;DR

Young children see parents as emphasizing health and control when it comes to food, but they mostly choose foods based on their own preferences.

## Contribution

This study reveals how young children interpret and selectively use parental feeding messages in their own food choices.

## Key findings

- Children often portray parents as emphasizing health, control, and negotiation regarding food.
- Children's own food choices are primarily driven by personal preference rather than parental guidance.
- There is a mismatch between children's representations of parental feeding strategies and their own food-choice reasoning.

## Abstract

What are the main findings?
Young children portray parents as emphasizing health, control, and negotiation when guiding food intake, yet their own food choices are primarily driven by personal preference.For most children, representations of parental feeding strategies do not align with the considerations guiding their immediate food-choice decisions.

Young children portray parents as emphasizing health, control, and negotiation when guiding food intake, yet their own food choices are primarily driven by personal preference.

For most children, representations of parental feeding strategies do not align with the considerations guiding their immediate food-choice decisions.

What are the implications of the main findings?
Food-related socialization in early childhood is contextual and interpretive, with children actively selecting when and how parental messages inform their choices.Nutrition education and health promotion efforts may benefit from explicitly engaging children’s agency and preferences rather than relying solely on adult-directed health messaging.

Food-related socialization in early childhood is contextual and interpretive, with children actively selecting when and how parental messages inform their choices.

Nutrition education and health promotion efforts may benefit from explicitly engaging children’s agency and preferences rather than relying solely on adult-directed health messaging.

Background/Objectives: Research on children’s eating has primarily focused on parental feeding practices and dietary outcomes, with less attention to how young children themselves understand parental food-related messages and relate them to their own food choices. Recognizing children as active participants in food socialization, this study aimed to examine preschool children’s representations of parental feeding strategies alongside their expressed food-choice considerations. Methods: A qualitative, exploratory, multi-method design was employed within a constructivist framework. Forty kindergarten children aged 4 years 10 months to 5 years 8 months participated in individual, play-based sessions conducted in familiar educational settings. Data were generated using two complementary tools: a doll role-play task eliciting children’s representations of parental feeding strategies and a simulated grocery shopping task eliciting food-choice considerations. All sessions were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: During role-play, children frequently portrayed parents as emphasizing health-related arguments, control, and negotiation when guiding food intake. Less frequently, they represented strategies such as encouragement to try, deception, or references to body weight. In contrast, during the food-choice task, children’s selections were primarily guided by personal preference, with health considerations mentioned less often. For most participants, the feeding strategies attributed to parents did not closely align with the considerations guiding their own food choices. Conclusions: The findings highlight young children’s active and selective engagement with parental feeding discourse and underscore the contextual nature of food-related meaning-making in early childhood. Rather than reflecting a straightforward transmission of parental messages, children’s food choices appear shaped by situational affordances and perceived autonomy, supporting child-centered approaches to nutrition education and health promotion.