Four researchers at Oxford University’s Department of Psychiatry recently conducted a study that compared twenty-six mothers of children with non-organic failure to thrive with another group of twenty-six individually matched mothers of healthy children. The eating habits and patterns of the mother’s, and the foods that they fed and allowed their children, were closely studied, as were the mothers’ views of their child’s weight and shape. The researchers found that the mother’s of the children with non-organic failure to thrive had elevated levels of dietary restraint than the comparison group, and also that despite their child’s low weight, these mother’s were restricting their child’s intake of “sweets” and foods that they considered to be “fattening” or “unhealthy”.
These findings suggest that maternal eating habits and attitudes have a contributing role in the origins of non-organic failure to thrive. They also raise concerns about how unhealthy or disordered eating patterns can be passed on from one generation to the next. Young children are extremely impressionable and when the first thing they learn and are surrounded by is a mother with unhealthy eating habits and attitudes, these habits and attitudes are what is hardwired into their brains as normal and healthy. Where you are affects what foods you eat, but also how you eat them, and how much of them you eat. Children in environments with mothers who have unhealthy eating patterns are more apt to have unhealthy eating patterns as well.
<http://adc.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/70/3/234>
Zak Rosencrantz
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