Parents' food choice for their preschool-aged children: A means-end investigation

Background: Despite the growing literature on the importance of parental feeding practices, the factors that influence how parents make decisions regarding the foods they offer to their young children are not fully understood. Means-end theory and its associated methodology known as laddering provide a useful framework for characterizing the relationships between the attributes of a choice option (e.g., a food item), the consequences (i.e., the benefits or costs/risks) associated with those attributes and the personal values (i.e., enduring beliefs) those consequences help reinforce. The present research uses this means-end perspective to enrich our understanding of how parents make food choices for their preschool-aged children. Methods: Interviews were conducted with parents (N = 33) of 3- to 5-year-old children to explore the factors underlying parents' decisions regarding the foods they recently offered, prefer to offer and avoid offering to their preschooler. The resulting data were transcribed, content analysed and summarized in a series of summary diagrams known as hierarchical value maps (HVMs). Results: Study results indicate that although most parents reported trying to make food decisions because they want their child to be healthy, factors such as avoiding fights/battles and low perceived likelihood their child would eat a food may be barriers to offering certain foods. Conclusions: Taken together, these study findings enhance our understanding of the range of meanings underlying parents' food choice decisions and suggest opportunities for interventions to improve the quality of foods that parents offer to their children at home.