Are You Turning Your Child Into an Emotional Eater?
If a mother reaches for cakes, chocolates or other snacks when she’s feeling down, her children could become emotional eaters as well. Kids’ chances of becoming emotional eaters are shaped by both their natural eating tendencies and their parent’s influence, according to a new British study. Emotional eating refers to indulging in “comfort” foods when feeling sad or anxious, not because you’re hungry.
“Our findings suggest that children who were more motivated to eat were more predisposed to associate food with emotions,” said study co-author Rebecca Stone, a Ph.D. student at Aston University in Birmingham.
“Our research supports the idea that emotional eating is a learned behavior which children often develop in preschool years, but that some children are more vulnerable to developing emotional eating than others,” Stone added in a university news release.
Excerpted from UPI
