Parental influence on children’s eating behaviours starts even before birth, with perinatal exposures. The foetus has its first taste experiences through the amniotic fluid, which is favoured by the mother’s diet. Studies have shown that foetal flavour exposure increases acceptance of similarly flavoured foods when re-exposed during infancy and possibly childhood [34]. In milk feeding, the flavour composition of breast milk may vary with maternal diet, whereas infant formula has the same flavour over time [35]. It has been suggested that the sensory experience with human breastmilk influences food acceptance through flavour learning [36]. The type of infant formula may also influence the acceptance of tastes; infants fed with hydrolysed casein formulas, which have pronounced bitter, sour, and savoury tastes, appear to accept new foods more readily later [37,38]. The way each infant is fed, whether directly from the breast or by the bottle, may also be a factor to consider. With bottle feeding, mothers/caregivers have control over the amount of milk offered and the amount ingested by the infant, which could encourage the caregiver to feed an infant regardless of internal hunger and satiety signals [39]. Direct breastfeeding during early infancy has been related to greater appetite regulation in later childhood [40,41]. In a study of Chilean adolescents, shorter breastfeeding duration was associated with poorer satiety response and higher eating in the absence of hunger [42]. However, the associations between breastfeeding and eating behaviours are not consistent. Other studies found no evidence that increased breastfeeding has a lasting and consistent effect on children’s eating behaviours [43,44].

The timing and types of foods introduced during complementary feeding seem also to play a role in the development of eating behaviours [45]. Complementary feeding is a sensitive period for learning food preferences and appetite control, in which infants discover the sensory and nutritional properties of foods [45]. Infants are born with taste predispositions that include rejection of novel foods (food neophobia) and bitter/sour tastes and preference for sweet tastes [46]. When and which foods are introduced during complementary feeding could influence the acceptance of new foods and eating behaviours [47]. Repeated exposure to a variety of foods and textures during the “sensitive period” for introduction to solid foods, between four to five months of age, is thought to promote food acceptance later in life [47,48]. In addition, children who are introduced to a variety of fruits and vegetables early in complementary feeding seem to more readily accept new foods during this period [47].

Throughout childhood, parents are the primary caretakers responsible for shaping their children’s food environment through the foods they choose to purchase and make available, the rules they establish around the timing, frequency, and structure of the meals, and the interactions they have with their children during mealtimes [49]. Parental feeding practices are the strategies used by parents to control or modify what, when, and how much their child eats (e.g., actions such as pressuring the child to eat more, restricting certain foods, or monitoring food consumption) [49]. These practices are influenced by a complex interplay of factors, including socioeconomic characteristics, such as family income and education, cultural background, personality factors, and psychological health [50,51,52,53,54]. Beyond these factors, parents appear to adapt their feeding practices depending on their child’s temperament [55], weight [21,56,57], and eating behaviours [18,19,58,59,60], as well as their perceptions and beliefs about these characteristics [59,61,62,63,64,65,66,67].

For the assessment of the different dimensions of parental feeding practices, many instruments have been developed [68]. The most widely applied tool is the Child Feeding Questionnaire (CFQ) [69], which has been shown to have good psychometric properties in the paediatric population [70]. This questionnaire comprises seven subscales. Four of these measure parental perceptions and concerns about body weight, both their child’s and their own, that may affect parental control of children’s eating: Perceived responsibility (assessing parents’ perceptions of their responsibility for child feeding), Perceived parent weight, Perceived child weight, and Concern about child weight. The other three subscales measure parental feeding practices and attitudes: Restriction (the extent to which parents restrict their child’s access to food); Pressure to eat (tendency to pressure the children to eat more food); and Monitoring (the extent to which parents supervise their child’s eating) [69].

Other popular and validated instruments include The Parental Feeding Style Questionnaire (PFSQ) [71], the Food-Related Parenting Practices Questionnaire [72], the Comprehensive Feeding Practices Questionnaire (CFPQ) [73], the Feeding Practices and Structure Questionnaire (FPSQ) [74], and the Scale of Overt and Covert Control [75]. The latter was conceptualized to distinguish overt and covert restrictive feeding practices. Overt control refers to explicit control over food consumption, such as being firm about what a child should eat, while covert control refers to controlling food intake in a way that cannot be detected by a child, such as avoiding keeping snack foods at home [75].

In 2016, Vaughn and colleagues classified and categorized parental feeding practices documented in the literature into three overarching constructs—coercive control, structure, and autonomy support—with several specific practices within each construct [76]. Coercive control refers to specific control that reflects an attempt to dominate, pressure, or impose the will of the parents over child’s intake. This includes practices such as restricting the child’s access to food, pressuring the child to eat, and using food as a reward or to control negative emotions (instrumental feeding) [76]. Structure is based on the parents’ organization of the children’s eating environment to help them learn and maintain certain dietary behaviours, including parents’ consistent enforcement of rules and boundaries around eating [76]. Structure includes practices such as rules and limits, limited or guided choices, monitoring, role modelling, and food availability and accessibility [76]. Autonomy support is promoting “psychological autonomy and encouragement of independence” [76]. This concerns offering children choices and age-appropriate independent exploration and fostering the child’s capacity to self-regulate when the parent is not present [76]. Autonomy support includes parental strategies such as using logic to persuade children to change their eating behaviours (reasoning); using positive reinforcement through verbal feedback (praise); positively, gently, and supportively encouraging their children to adopt healthy eating habits (encouragement); involving the child in meal planning and preparation (child involvement); providing their children with information and skills to help them make informed food choices (nutrition/food education) [76].

The association between parental feeding practices and children’s eating behaviours has been extensively investigated (Table 2), with a focus on understanding how parents can influence their children’s eating behaviours. For a better organization, the description of these associations will be carried out, according to the Vaughn and colleagues’ classification and categorization of parental feeding practices [76], as follows.

Coercive control practices are among the most studied and appear to have more negative than positive effects [76]. It has been hypothesized that these practices may impair children’s ability to self-regulate and respond appropriately to their internal signals of hunger or satiety, making them less able to self-regulate food intake [28,77]. In several cross-sectional studies, controlling feeding practices, such as restriction, were mostly associated with food approach behaviours, such as a tendency to overeat [49], high food responsiveness [60,77,78,79] and enjoyment of food [16]. In longitudinal studies, restrictive feeding practices from 5 to 9 years of age were associated with increased eating in the absence of hunger (measured in a laboratory setting by giving children free access to a variety of palatable snacks after a standard lunch) [28]. At 2 years of age, maternal restriction was associated with a tendency to overeat, alongside other food approach behaviours (such as a more avid appetite and enjoyment of food) one year later [16]. On the other hand, pressure to eat was associated with behaviours such as high food fussiness and low food responsiveness and enjoyment of food in cross-sectional [77,78] and longitudinal studies [80]. Instrumental feeding (the use of food to reward children’s behaviour) was associated with eating in the absence of hunger [81].

Regarding structure, there is evidence suggesting that this practice may promote healthier children’s diet-related outcomes. Structured, family-meal setting was related to increased levels of self-regulation in eating among preschool-aged children [82]. Mealtime structure was related to low food fussiness [83,84]. Monitoring (the extent to which parents track what and how much the child eats) [69] was negatively associated with the tendency to overeat and other food approach behaviours [77,85], even using a longitudinal study design [16]. Modelling of healthy eating predicted low child food fussiness and high interest in food one year later in a sample of 157 children aged 2- to 4-years-old [80].

Autonomy-supportive practices, such as the involvement of the children and encouraging them to try new foods, were associated with healthier food choices [86,87,88]. However, the association with eating behaviours has been less examined. In a study of 111 2-to 4- year-old children, practices such as involving children in food preparation and teaching children about nutrition were related to greater enjoyment of food and less food fussiness [89]. Low levels of food fussiness were associated with great maternal encouragement of balance and variety in children aged 3 to 6 years [90]. In a qualitative study, parents of children (aged 2 to 5 years) with healthy food preferences reported using strategies such as encouraging children to try new foods and involving children in food selection and preparation [91]. A few randomized control trials have examined the effect of interventions targeting parental feeding practices on children’s eating behaviours. In the INSIGHT Responsive Parenting intervention, mothers were taught how to recognize and respond appropriately to hunger and fullness cues and how to adopt structure-based and non-controlling feeding practices (intervention group n = 140, control group n = 139). The intervention content was delivered in four home visits during the first year after birth [92]. Results have shown that this intervention led to decreased use of controlling feeding practices, such as pressure to eat and instrumental feeding, and an increase in structure-based feeding practices, such as consistent meal routines, at ages 1 and 3 years [92,93]. Regarding eating behaviours, emotional overeating was the only behaviour that differed between groups (lower in children from the intervention group). However, a moderation effect was observed for satiety responsiveness and food responsiveness on some maternal feeding practices (i.e., for children with lower levels of food responsiveness, mothers from the control group used more pressure than mothers from the intervention group) [92]. In the NOURISH randomized controlled trial, the intervention comprised two modules of six sessions, delivered over 12 weeks (intervention group n = 352, control group n = 346) [94]. Parents were guided on responsive feeding practices and how to promote healthy food intake and limit exposure to energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods to support the development of healthy food preferences [94]. This intervention resulted in small but significant effects on children’s eating behaviours. Children from the intervention group showed lower food responsiveness and higher satiety responsiveness up to 3.5 years post-intervention [95].

Despite the literature to date being mostly focused on the influence of parental feeding practices on children’s behaviours, it is also acknowledged that these behaviours can affect the feeding practices used by parents. Recent studies have examined this hypothesis and tested the direction of influence, whether parents influence children, children influence parents, or if there is a mutual influence [14,15,21,22,23]. These studies have used cross-lagged models to examine the causal influences between variables [96]. Variables can influence each other (bidirectional relationship), or one variable can influence another without mutual influence (unidirectional relationship). A study of 4845 mother–child dyads from the population-based Generation R cohort found bidirectional associations between pressure to eat and food fussiness, from 18 months to 6 years of age [21]. However, the strongest path was found to be from fussy eating at 3 years old to pressure to eat one year later [21]. In the Generation XXI cohort (n = 3698), from 4 to 7 years of age, pressuring practices were also bidirectionally associated with food refusal and eating small amounts of food [23]. This suggests that despite parents’ intentions to increase their child’s food consumption by pressuring them to eat more, this practice seems to be counterproductive and worsens existing food avoidance behaviours. Another study, on 187 children aged 4- to 5 years old, examining an 18-month period, found that observed prompts to eat (directing the child to consume a food different from the food that they are eating) were associated with eating in observance of hunger, but no association was found in the opposite direction or for any other forms of pressure [97]. This suggests that different forms of pressuring a child to eat may lead to different results and highlights the importance of a more in-depth examination of this practice. Nevertheless, this also advocates that pressure to eat may be counterproductive [97]. Additionally, a study in infants, evaluating three-time points from 3 to 12 months of age, found that food avoidance was prospectively associated with higher parental persuasive feeding (feeding the infant even if they are not hungry), but this practice did not predict infants’ behaviours [98].

In the study from Generation XXI, practices such as monitoring the child’s food consumption were negatively associated in both directions with eating large amounts of food and food refusal (i.e., parents who used these practices reported less that their children were eating large amounts of food and refusing to eat) [23]. These associations suggest that monitoring strategies may support the establishment of desirable eating behaviours in childhood.

Regarding restriction, in Generation XXI, parents of children who were eating large amounts of food at age 4 restricted the children’s access to foods (by ensuring that the child does not eat these foods and avoiding buying them) and were more concerned about the child’s weight at age 7, but no effect of these practices on children’s behaviour was observed [23]. Jansen et al., in a sample of 207 Australian children, reported an association between covert restriction at age 2 and low food responsiveness from 2 to 3.7 years of age, but not from 3.7 to age 5 [14]. This suggests that the effect of these types of practices may be more noticeable at younger ages. However, it is difficult to directly compare the results since these studies have used different methods to evaluate and analyse parental feeding practices.

In a study of 797 children from a Norwegian cohort, instrumental feeding at age 6 years predicted emotional overeating and food responsiveness at age 8 [15], whereas, in a sample of 479 low-income children, this practice was bi-directionally associated with food responsiveness from age 1 to 3 years (high food responsiveness predicted instrumental feeding and vice versa) [22]. In E. Jansen et al. (2018), high reward for behaviour was prospectively associated with food responsiveness at age 3.7 years, but from age 3.7 to age 5, these associations were no longer significant. In another study, from the Generation R cohort, the use of food as a reward was found to predict emotional overeating and picky eating from ages 4 to 9, but, also, high levels of emotional overeating and food responsiveness were related to more use of food as a reward [99]. Despite some inconsistencies in the findings, these studies suggest that instrumental feeding practices may promote the development of food approach behaviours in childhood. It is plausible that offering certain foods (usually highly palatable) as rewards may increase children’s preference and interest in these foods.