Understand the relationship between parents and food and children

If your child eats poorly, the Gourmet Jr. alert: it may have – and a lot – to do with the parents. For more than 30 years studying the relationship between parents, children and food, doctor Benny Kerzner, pediatrician and gastroenterologist at the Children's National Medical Center, in Washington DC / USA, specializes in nutrition and childhood eating disorders. In 2010, he published a guide, aimed at pediatricians, with suggestions on how to deal with complaints from families about the child's relationship with the plate of food.

In his material, the doctor says that “between 20% and 60% of parents say that their children do not eat well, that they are very selective or 'weird', or that they eat very little, that they do not advance towards a more complex diet, rejecting anything new, or who just like junk food”. doctor Kerzner also says that “there is good evidence that feeding difficulties may not be associated with an illness, but rather with conflicts between parents and child.”

To understand more about how the relationship between parents and children influences their diet, Gourmet Jr. talked with Dr. Ana Carolina Fantin, Psychologist from PUC-SP, with specialization in Clinical Psychology and Psychoanalysis also from PUC-SP, who explained to us the relationship between children and food, through the perspective of psychoanalysis and how mothers and fathers influence their children's diet .