Parents who want normal-weight children shouldn't try to control how much they eat - left alone, most youngsters instinctively know how much is good for them.
"You have to have a little bit of faith in your child's ability to know when they're hungry and when they're not," said Susan L. Johnson, the lead author of a new study of 77 preschoolers ages 3 to 5.Stringently tracking the child's eating can lead to problems: Children with the most body fat had mothers who were the most "controlling" about diet, the study found. The children were also the least likely to eat appropriate amounts of calories spontaneously.
"The more control the mother reported using over her child's eating, the less self-regulation the child displayed," authors of the study say in the November issue of Pediatrics.
Parents should just "relax a little," said Johnson, a nutritionist and postdoctoral fellow in pediatrics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
"While they still remain responsible for providing healthy choices for their kids in terms of food selection, kids are capable of figuring out how much to eat," she said.
The study was done at a preschool at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where Johnson and co-author Leann L. Birch formerly worked. Birch now is a professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University.
Children whose mothers allowed them to be highly spontaneous about food showed a natural instinct for regulating their own calories, the researchers said.
Researchers have estimated that one of every four U.S. children is obese.