Does an Adult's Food Likes & Dislikes Have Any Influence on What the Children Eat?

Altering Genetic Preferences

• In 1999 research from the University of California at Berkley's "Annual Review of Nutrition," Penn State's Leann L. Birch writes that the predisposition to like fat and sugar are ingrained because these foods were rare when our taste buds evolved. By being programmed to enjoy a larger amount of meat or honey, we got the benefit of a short-lived caloric boost. Since highly nutritious foods like dark leafy greens may be bitter and therefore aversive, it takes some taste bud reprogramming to enjoy them.

  When parents serve high-fat or sugary foods, taste buds get used to the much sweeter, or fattier, fare. By choosing ice cream over apples, parents encourage changes in taste preference, and the future eating habits of their children.

Parental Modeling Matters More Than Food Control

• Dietary choice is not as simple as putting restrictions on what children eat. In the Oxford University Press' journal, "Health Education Research," Rachel Brown and Jane Ogden note that higher rates of dietary controlling behaviors resulted in higher consumption of both healthy and unhealthy snacks. This study cited parental modeling as a more effective model for changing what children choose to eat. Instead of trying to control what children eat, leading by example seems to be a more effective method for altering dietary preferences.

Pavlovian Food Preferences

• The way parents eat and respond to food is an important factor in how children eat. The aforementioned Oxford University piece reports that human eating behavior is heavily influenced by mere exposure -- the tendency to like things based on seeing them more often; and social learning -- the tendency to prefer items associated with positive social feedback or activities, like Christmas cookies or birthday cake.

  This study also notes that the conditioning effect plays a large role. According to authors Eertman, Baeyens and Ven den Bergh, parents' facial expressions when eating similar foods may be enough to alter children's preferences for those choices. Researchers compared this response to that of Pavlov's dog, who was trained to salivate at a bell. This suggests that children can be primed to enjoy foods that their parents encourage through their own positive responses to them.

What Mothers Eat Affects Food Availability

• Research from a January 2011 issue of the "British Journal of Nutrition" indicates that women who followed dietary recommendations had children who ate similarly. This research suggested that nearly one-third of dietary choices were related to what mom was eating. Researchers note that the effect of maternal diet is so strong that the diet and health of children may be controlled effectively through alteration of their mother's diet. This may be related to both modeling and the fact that the foods mothers eat tend to be most available. The foods eaten by parents may be foods that are likely to be in the house when a child gets hungry.