Emotional eating: why we shouldn’t comfort or reward children with sweets and snacks

Many parents have used food to comfort or calm children at some point, but new research confirms that it’s a short-term fix that can have long-term negative consequences

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Junk food, sedentary lifestyles and not concentrating on what’s on the plate – add emotional eating to the mix and the potential for problems is vast.

Published: 12:30pm, 5 Jun 2017Updated: 5:23pm, 5 Jun 2017

Most parents have done it at some point: calmed and comforted their children with sweets, ice cream or their favourite snack when they’re hurt or upset.

“Of course it comes from the best intentions – no one likes to see their child experiencing emotional discomfort,” says Hong Kong-based eating behaviour coach Tatiana Kuvardina. “Parents are instinctively trying to help – to distract, to comfort, to replace pain with pleasure – and they are simply unaware that emotional feeding might have bitter consequences for their kids in the future.”

Emotional eating – increasing food consumption as a result of negative emotions – has been shown in a number of studies to be linked to obesity, which in turn is associated with conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. Add to that a fast-food culture and sedentary lifestyle and the situation is worsened.

A slight decrease in the rates of childhood obesity in Hong Kong between 2010 and 2012 shouldn’t blind us to the scale of the problem.

Childhood obesity is a growing concern in Hong Kong and China. According to Hong Kong health officials, although the percentage of overweight students in the city decreased from 21.4 per cent in 2010 to 20.9 in 2012, this rate is significantly higher than the 16.4 per cent of 15 years ago.

A study conducted between 1985 and 2014 on nearly 40,000 students aged seven to 18 by the Shandong Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Jinan, Shandong province, eastern China found that about one in six boys and one in 11 girls were obese.