Family members' roles in healthy-eating socialization based on a healthy-eating intervention

Purpose - Healthy-eating socialization is often described as a bi-directional process, but there are only few studies on children and parent's roles in the process. This paper aims to investigate children and parents' accounts of awareness and involvement in healthy eating and how they relate it to their roles in healthy-eating socialization. Design/methodology/approach - Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 38 families three months after a healthy-eating intervention involving dietary advice and SMS feedback. The interviews were analysed by means of qualitative content analysis. Findings - Children and parents identified several causes of awareness and involvement in healthy eating: new or re-activated health knowledge, visualization of amounts, self-regulation and planning. Children adopted two strategies in terms of family socialization: a direct strategy placing demands on parents or a cooperative strategy helping the parents. Parents initiated dialogues with family members about healthy eating and felt responsible as role models often honouring the children's demands and help. Research limitations/implications - Findings provide a concrete empirical account of the socialization process and confirm that parents still have the superior hand, when it comes to healthy eating, but with children as active players. The authors suggest future studies to explore the development of influence and awareness of healthy eating among children and the extent to which children wish to engage in healthy-eating socialization. Originality/value - The study supplements previous research by including children's immediate family as a unit of analysis. By taking an intra-familiar systemic approach to studying family socialization, future studies can take into account the family support (or lack hereof), when designing interventions and evaluating the outcomes.