Okul öncesi dönemdeki çocuklarda öz düzenleme, ebeveyn besleme stilleri ve duygusal yeme davranışları: Boylamsal bir çalışma

Children's emotional eating could be driven by their individual characteristics and parenting behaviors. From this perspective, in this study, we tested the child-driven and parent-driven antecedents of emotional eating to understand the underlying mechanisms of emotional eating in children. In detail, we explored the transactional association among parental feeding styles, mealtime technoference, and children's self-regulation in predicting emotional eating during preschool years. We collected data from 231 children at two-time points, the fall and spring semesters. Children's ages ranged between 36 to 76 months (M = 58.49, SD = 9.07) in the fall and aged between 44 to 80 months (M = 65.26, SD = 8.27) in the spring. Parents reported children's eating behaviors, feeding styles, and mealtime technoference in the fall and spring semesters. Researchers measured children's performance-based self-regulation. Cross-lagged path analyses were conducted for a total of six different models. We found a bidirectional relationship between mealtime technoference and children's emotional overeating behaviors but could not find bidirectional relations between parental feeding styles (emotional and control feeding) and children's emotional eating behaviors. However, emotional overeating was predicted by parental emotional feeding and child self-regulation; parental control feeding was predicted by emotional undereating. These results show that emotional eating is an outcome of both child- and parent-driven factors. The results are discussed in detail within the Transactional Human Development Model (THDM) framework.