A recent paper(5) describes two pri

A recent paper(5) describes two primary aspects of control:
restriction, which involves restricting children’s access to
junk foods and restricting the total amount of food, and
pressure, which involves pressuring children to eat healthy
foods (usually fruits and vegetables) and pressuring to eat
more in general. Parents may use a combination of these
methods to obtain a desired result; for example, pressuring
a child to eat healthy foods by using bribes or rewards consisting
of sugary snacks that are otherwise restricted(19).
Parent restriction has short term and long term effect on
children’s intake. It enhances preference, increases attention
and intake at first, then this curb increases intake, increases
eating in the absence of hunger, doesn’t produce ability to
self-regulate diet but causes negative self evaluation, greater
weight gain from 5 to 11 years(5).
Pressuring children to eat, likewise appears to be counterproductive,
reducing children’s ability to regulate their
energy intake(6). A further study(11) has linked ‘pressure
to eat’ to reduced consumption of fruit and vegetables in
5- year-old girls. A common assumption runs through these
studies: that controlling children’s intake of food is a causal
factor in their poor eating patterns. It is entirely plausible,
however, that the direction of causality runs counter to this;
that, in fact, parents use of control is a response to unhealthy
eating habits. Others researches have explored the impact of
controlling food intake by rewarding the consumption of
‘healthy food’ as in ‘if you eat your vegetables I will be
pleased with you’. For example, Birch et al. (12) gave children
food in association with positive adult attention compared
with more neutral situations.
This was shown to increase food preference; but as concluded
by Birch: “although these practices can induce children
to eat more vegetables in the short run, evidence from our
research suggests that in the long run parental control attempts
may have negative effects on the quality of children’s diets by
reducing their preferences for those foods.”(13)
Initial evidence indicates that imposition of stringent parental
controls can enhance preferences for high-fat and
energy-dense foods, limit children’s acceptance of a variety
of foods and disrupt children’s regulation of energy intake
by altering children’s responsiveness to internal cues of
hunger and satiety. This can occur when well-intended
but concerned parents assume that children need help in