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Category: Project

Description: Although most food parenting research has been performed among parents of (young) children, recent studies suggest that food parenting practices (i.e., context-specific acts of parenting concerning food and eating to socialize children toward certain behaviours) may still impact food intake during adolescence (Blaine, Kachurak, Davison, Klabunde, & Fisher, 2017; Fleary & Ettienne, 2019; Koning, Vink, Renders, et al., 2021). As such, it is important to understand the development of food parenting practices among parents of adolescents. Parental wellbeing (i.e., stress and depressive symptoms) may influence the development of food parenting through several mechanisms, including use of easier and shorter-term coping strategies to manage children’s behaviours and for acquiring and preparing food and meals. So far, research suggests that worse parental mental wellbeing is associated with use of less effective (i.e., structure and autonomy support) and more ineffective (i.e., coercive controlling) food parenting practices both before and during COVID-19 (Elias, et al., 2016; Goulding, et al., 2014; Haycraft, 2020; Jansen, et al., 2021; Wang, Devjani, Chillakanti, Dunton, & Mason, 2021). However, previous studies have mostly been limited by cross-sectional designs. Our study adds to the current literature in two main ways. First, we perform longitudinal research needed to establish the causal order of associations between parental wellbeing and follow-up food parenting practices while controlling for baseline food parenting constructs. Second, we focus on the link between parental wellbeing and food parenting in a sample of parents of adolescent children, while previous studies mainly focused on parents of (younger) children. Importantly, our follow-up food parenting measure has been collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic itself can be regarded as a social experiment in which families have been exposed to generally more stressful life events. A great deal of research on the impact of this pandemic on parental wellbeing has shown, on average, increasing stress rates and higher levels of depressive symptoms during the pandemic compared with the pre-pandemic period (Achterberg, Dobbelaar, Boer, & Crone, 2021; Bendau, et al., 2021). As such, the pandemic may also negatively impact food parenting (Cerniglia, Tambelli, Trombini, Andrei, & Cimino, 2021). However, the COVID-19 pandemic does not have similar negative effects for all parents. There are also reports about increasing time available to spend on high-quality family life (Brown, Doom, Lechuga-Peña, Watamura, & Koppels, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have most prominent negative effects among vulnerable parents who experienced more stress and depressive symptoms before the COVID-19 situation (Achterberg, et al., 2021; Brown, et al., 2020). Therefore, it is important to examine whether pre-COVID-19 parental stress and depressive symptoms may particularly precede the development of less effective food parenting practices during COVID-19 among vulnerable parents who experienced more stressful life-events during the COVID-19 pandemic.