Strong feelings, small bites: investigating emotional undereating in children's picky eating and food neophobia within the family context.

OBJECTIVE: Food neophobia and picky eating in young children are important barriers to developing healthy eating patterns. Given the crucial role that families, especially parents, play in shaping children's eating behavior, we aimed to examine emotional undereating underlying children's food neophobia and picky eating within the family context. METHOD: Parents (N = 170) of children aged 3-8 years (M = 5.45, SD = 1.69; 51.8% boys) reported on their child's food neophobia, picky eating, and emotional undereating. Parents also reported on their own food refusal behavior (modeling), pressure to eat (feeding practices), and emotional acceptance of the child (parenting style). RESULTS: Mediation analyses showed that emotional undereating mediated the association between parental acceptance of the child and both food neophobia and picky eating. In contrast, parents' own food refusal behaviors and pressure to eat were directly associated with children's food refusal behavior. These associations were not mediated by emotional undereating. DISCUSSION: The findings underscore the role of the parent-child relationship quality and emotion regulation in explaining children's food refusal behavior. Longitudinal research is needed to replicate and extend these results and further examine how family context variables and emotion regulation strategies contribute to the development and maintenance of children's food avoidance.