아동의 양육환경이 초등학생의 편식 행동에 미치는 영향

Influence of Parenting Environment on Dietary Behaviors of Having an Unbalanced Diet among Primary School Students

  The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of parenting environment on unbalanced dietary behavior among primary school students. The questionnaires were distributed to 285 students(148 male and 137 female) attending a primary school in Cheongju city. The data were analyzed using SAS and statistics used were percent of frequency, χ²-test, ANOVA and Duncan"s multiple comparison test. Children who had an unbalanced diet accounted for 63.9%, and 43.4% of children started to develope their unbalanced dietary behavior early on when they were low grades in primary school. The reason of having an unbalanced diet was because the food was not tasty(71.4%), the highest percentage among respondents, and because they had never tried the food before(16.5%). 34.6% of the surveyed families did not intervene in the unbalanced dietary behavior of children, and 8.0% had mothers who never provided the advice even if their children had an unbalanced diet. Meanwhile, 48.2% had mothers who provided the advice from time to time. The analysis on the relationship between the parenting environment and the unbalanced dietary behavior indicated that the group which was not provided with a strict education on the unbalanced diet was more likely to develop and display unbalanced dietary behavior than the group that was provided with a strict education on the unbalanced diet(p＜0.01). In addition, children who are the only ones in families and children who did not have sufficient physical contact with parents when they were a child were more likely to make a distinction between the food that they like and the food they dislike, which was analyzed in terms of the number of food that they dislike and the relationship with the parenting environment. The findings of this study indicated that it was very important for parents to provide children with a strict education on dietary behavior and enough physical contact while their children are growing up in order to prevent unbalanced dietary behavior of children. For that, more extensive education on nutrition needs to be provided to parents and children.