How Eating Habits are Formed: Parents' Attitudes Towards What Their Children Eat - Dissertation Example

There are 20 literary sources used in the work, and the main analysis will be based on the questionnaires, received from parents and containing basic questions about their children's diet.
Acknowledgments
To examine the data there was used the five-item Likert scale.
Literary Review

It is necessary to point out the main topics discussed in the literature I have used in this work. No one doubts that the problem of nutrition, especially among children, is very urgent today. But there are not many literary sources that deeply research this subject.

The problem of nutrition of children started to become urgent several years ago with the increase of obesity among them. Now doctors are concerned about children's diet all over the world, though many parents still allow their children to eat whatever they want without taking care of their eating habits.

Fewer than 15 percent of the two million elementary school-age children eat the recommended five or more daily servings of fruits and vegetables. The dismal discovery from a new analysis data means that the vast majority of children are at increased risk for obesity and numerous chronic diseases unless they learn to make more healthful choices for their meals and snacks. (McVey, 2001)

Children tend to eat high-calorie food instead of fruits or vegetables which they must have every day five times a day. But there are very few parents who follow this norm.

One of the main problems of the present time is that parents often allow their children to watch TV while they are eating, which ultimately leads to the malfunctioning of the stomach and other organs.

The TV set may also be linked to obesity. A study indicated that a child who watches four or more hours of television a day has twice the risk of being obese as a child who watches less. Prolonged television watching leads to both - a decrease in physical activity and an increase in eating. (Foote, 2004)

Adults don't pay too much attention to what their children eat, and that's the problem. The thing is that children can be taught good eating habits through example.

So, let's pay some attention to the role of attitudes in people's lives. Why do attitudes play such a big role And why is it difficult to prove the significance of attitudes

It has long been supposed that perceptual and cognitive processes are guided by attitudes. The two most-often-stated principles regarding attitude-guided information processing are that persons selectively (a) seek information that agrees with their attitudes while avoiding disagreeing information and (b) remember attitude-agreeable information in preference to disagreeable information. (Ajzen, 2002)