Dialogical Construction of Parental Feeding Strategies During Family Mealtimes

Abstract

This study focuses on social interactions during family mealtimes to examine the types of arguments used by parents to convince their children to eat. The results of this study show that feeding practices during mealtimes are dialogically constructed by parents and children together. Parents mostly used arguments based on the quality and quantity of food, adapting their language to the child’s level of understanding. Future research might consider the observations and the subtle qualitative analyses of social interactions among family members as examples of possible ways to recognize the dialogical construction of feeding practices during mealtimes.

Keywords: argumentation, feeding practices, food-negotiation, parent-child interaction, qualitative research, social interactions