Food Choice 41for food consumption as long as the “symbolic context” of reward delivery
was positive and did not indicate that “eating the target foods was a low
value activity” (p. 78). As long as the child cannot think, “I am being offered
a reward to eat my vegetables; therefore, vegetables must be an intrinsically
negative thing,” then rewards may work.
Food and control
The associations between food and rewards highlight a role for parental
control over eating behavior. Some research has addressed the impact of
control as studies indicate that parents often believe that restricting access
to food and forbidding children to eat food are good strategies to improve
food preferences (Casey and Rozin 1989; Moore, Tapper, and Murphy, 2007).
Birch (1999) reviewed the evidence for the impact of imposing any form
of parental control over food intake and argued that it is not only the use
of foods as rewards which can have a negative effect on children’s food
preferences but also attempts to limit a child’s access to foods. She con-
cluded from her review that “child feeding strategies that restrict children’s
access to snack foods actually make the restricted foods more attractive”
(Birch, 1999, 11). For example, Jansen, Mulkens, and Jansen (2007) allocated
parents to either the prohibition or the no-prohibition group and asked
them to either forbid or not forbid the consumption of target foods. The
results showed that prohibition resulted in a greater desire for the target
food and a greater consumption of this food compared to other foods.
Similarly, when food is made freely available, research indicates that children
will choose more of the restricted than the unrestricted foods, particularly
when the mother is not present (Fisher and Birch, 1999; Fisher et al., 2000).
From this perspective, parental control would seem to have a detrimental
impact upon a child’s eating behavior. In contrast, however, some studies
suggest that parental control may actually reduce weight and improve
eating behavior. For example, Wardle et al. (2002) suggested that “lack of
control of food intake [rather than higher control] might contribute to the
emergence of differences in weight” (p. 453). Similarly, Brown and Ogden
(2004) reported that greater parental control was associated with higher
intakes of healthy snack foods. Furthermore, other studies indicate that
parental control may have no impact in some populations (Constanzo and
Woody, 1985). There are several possible explanations for these conflicting
results. First, the studies have been carried out using different populations
in different countries. Second, the studies have used different measures,
with Birch and colleagues using the Child Feeding Questionnaire (CFQ;