Fathers feeding style and its efficacy on pre-school children’s body mass index, diet quality and eating behavior

Introduction: parental feeding style has an important influence on children dietary intake and their eating behaviors. Unlike in the past, beside the mothers that play a key role on formation of nutritional habits of their child, the fathers may have a basic effect on child’s diet. This article aimed to focus on the efficacy of father’s feeding style on children’s eating behavior, diet quality and body mass index in preschool ages. Methods: 10 articles from PubMed, Medline and Google scholar that were discussing about therelationship between each of the parents feeding style and child’s weight, diet and eating methods. Then we studied the parts that were about the father’s role on our considered parameters. Results: According to the articles we studied, there were no significant relationship between parental feeding style and pre-school child’s BMI; but we found that there is a direct relevance between fathers feeding style and child’s eating behavior and quality. Indeed, it seems father’s favorite foods, his enjoyment of foods, and his restriction time to be related with the diet quality and child’s decisions or choices about eating items. Conclusion: contrarily there are a few articles discussing about the role of fathers eating styles on child’s quality. On the other hand, the effects of some important factors like father’s work type and time, age gap between father and child, number of the meals that father can eat with his child, father and child BMI and Family economic conditions haven’t been studied in any of the articles, but thisstudy found evidence that father’s eating practice has a direct relationship with his pre-school age child’s eating behavior and its quality. However, father’s eating style has no effects on child’s BMI.

کلیدواژه ها:

father ، pre-school child ، feeding style ، eating behavior ، BMI.