Eureka! Institutional Repository

Purpose: Pickiness is an eating behaviour that many families with young children face and picky children have shown to have greater emotionality. Having family meals may impact the child’s pickiness in different ways such as their willingness to try novel foods. The aim of this study was to investigate if children’s mental well being and conflicts during meals were associated with pickiness among obesity prone children aged 2±6 years. Methodology: Data was obtained from the Healthy Start primary intervention study which included 635 children aged 2-6 years that were at high risk of overweight later in life. Information on pickiness and conflicts during meals were obtained from a parental questionnaire. Information on the children’s mental well-being was measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Crude and adjusted ordinal logistic regression were used to investigate associations. Results: We observed that families with conflicts during meal times referred to their child as either picky (31.6%) or a little picky (44.4%). Our results indicated that children with a higher SDQ difficulties score (mean=8, SD=4.2) were more picky (, p<0.002) whereas children with a higher prosocial score (mean=7.3, SD=2.1) were less picky (p <0.04). Conclusions: This study showed associations between conflicts during mealtime and picky behaviours and relation between pickiness and child behavioural problems.