Like Mother, Like Daughter

During occasional moments of frustration, mothers the world over sometimes wonder if they have any influence over their children on any issue. But we all know from personal experience how important our moms (and dads) are. They profoundly affect what we think, what we do, what we enjoy, what we dislike, whom we date and how we live our lives.

A large and growing body of scientific research demonstrates that moms are the single most important influence over their children's eating habits. Parents, typically mothers, provide the structure, choose the food and reinforce certain eating practices . Their own eating behavior and attitudes about food and the decisions they make about food for the children (grocery shopping, for example) send important (but sometimes conflicting) messages.

"Like mother, like daughter" is a phrase with deeper meaning than we often appreciate. Take me, for example. I grew up with a lovely mother who happened to have a weight problem. She went on diet after diet. She seemed unhappy with her body, her weight and, therefore, herself. Her shame and frustration made a big impression on me, and scared me about the miseries of being overweight and dieting . I was determined not to repeat her experience.

But studies show daughters of dieting mothers are more likely to diet or develop eating problems -- and I certainly did both. While I didn't want to repeat my mother's experience, I inevitably did.

My experience is typical for women across the country. Mom provides most of the information absorbed by the child concerning what to eat, when to eat and when to stop. Problems occur when mom gives faulty signals, often inadvertently, possibly because she has eating and weight problems of her own, which create eating and weight problems in her children, particularly daughters.

So a girl who watches her mother's rigid dieting, bingeing or controlling intake by restricting foods may adopt the same eating patterns simply through natural observation and modeling, even if Mom tries to shield her by encouraging healthy eating in her daughter and other family members.

These behaviors start as early as preschool. Researchers recently discovered that half of 5-year-old girls know all about dieting. And when researchers looked further, they found it was easy to predict which girls were diet-savvy. They were the ones with mothers who were dieting.

These patterns start the child on a course of lifelong eating habits that will serve her well -- or not. Children eat what is available to them and learn to prefer healthy, wholesome foods if they are frequently and positively offered and enjoyed by the whole family. Studies show children sample new foods more often when they observe their parents eating them, especially if coupled with parental attention and encouragement.

"We know, in general, giving negative messages is not effective," said Leann Birch, distinguished professor of human development at Pennsylvania State University. Putting a child on a diet, telling her she is overweight, restricting her access to foods in the house, singling her out or treating her differently than anyone else in the family are all reactions that can backfire and make what may be a temporary phase of chubbiness a serious weight problem.

Instead of restricting access to unhealthy or high-calorie foods, get rid of them! "The key is to get kids to like what is good for them," said Birch, "so they come to like things we don't need to restrict, like fruits and vegetables. That has to start early. Exposing children to new foods is dramatically positive and effective during the preschool period."

In studies conducted at Penn State, children's fat preferences and fat intakes were linked to parental fatness, so the heavier parents had kids who were preferring and eating diets that were higher in fat, said Birch. Parents who had healthful dietary behaviors had leaner children, with lower-fat eating patterns.

"Kids really will learn to prefer calorie-dense foods, and this could, in fact, be one of the factors that contribute to diets that are too high in calories and too high in fat," said Birch. But they can also learn to choose fruits, vegetables and other foods that will keep them healthy and fit.

In fact, what moms make available in the home shapes food preferences and eating habits even starting from the womb. Women who eat a wider variety of foods during pregnancy or breast feeding give birth to children who are more accepting of new foods. One study found that women who drank large amounts of carrot juice while pregnant gave birth to babies who responded more positively to carrots!

If parents don't eat vegetables, children don't. If parents don't drink milk and drink sodas instead, children replace milk with sodas. Even if parents try to encourage their children to eat healthier than they do, the studies clearly find that children do not respond by eating healthfully, unless their parents actually do it themselves.

Looking back on my childhood, this is another area in which my mother influenced me, whether I liked it or not. I think I was the only "unlucky" child in my neighborhood who wasn't allowed to drink sodas. The only beverages available in our home were milk and juice. Milk was consumed at every meal -- by Mom, Dad and all the kids. My friends teased me and sneaked me sodas when I visited them. But my guess is that I never developed a soda-drinking habit because sodas weren't available in my home. To this day, I drink milk at meals and drink diet sodas only infrequently. Needless to say, I'm very thankful for this influence even though at the time, it made me feel very uncool and sorry for myself!

If you want your children to naturally love healthy foods, make changes subtly so your child won't notice: Change your eating habits, slowly change what's available in the home so that only healthy food is around (except for the occasional Sunday night dessert offered to everyone) and make eating a positive experience. For a child to improve eating habits or lose weight, the entire family must participate; everyone needs to change a little bit and there has to be some compromise.

With the strong practical and emotional support from Mom and the whole family, it is possible for children to live in a balanced, nutritionally sound and healthy way. But without it, it's close to impossible to do so.

Katherine Tallmadge is a Washington nutritionist and author of "Diet Simple" (Lifeline Press, 2004). Send e-mails to her at food@washpost.com.