Teaching kindness in childhood: A path to healthier eating habits?

Studying the behaviors of children between the ages of five and 17, researchers have observed that those displaying kind, caring, and helpful behaviors (being prosocial) are more likely to consume fruit and vegetables as teenagers.

Their findings suggest that encouraging prosociality throughout childhood may be a novel intervention strategy to promote sustained healthy eating into young adulthood.

“Too often, we focus on what is going wrong in young people’s lives, but what we hear from them time and time again is that they are tired of that narrative. They want us adults to pay more attention to what is going right, including what they bring to their families and communities,” says lead investigator Farah Qureshi, ScD, MHS, Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

She notes prior research reveals that behaviors that help others, like volunteering, are related to better health in older adults. “We wanted to understand whether these types of activities benefit youth as well, focusing on a broader range of prosocial behaviors, like acts of kindness, cooperation, and caring for others.”

“In our current research, we found that children who consistently displayed more of these kinds of positive social behaviors at any age were more likely to maintain healthy eating habits into their teenage years, a time when dietary choices set patterns that can shape lifelong health.”

Quantifying kindness and dietary patterns

The researchers based their study on UK data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a nationally representative study that followed children from birth for over two decades.

Prosociality throughout childhood may promote sustained healthy eating into young adulthood.Parents reported on their child’s behaviors reflecting kindness, caring, and cooperation when they were five, seven, and 11 years old. The investigators observed whether the extent to which children engaged in these behaviors was related to their self-reported fruit and vegetable consumption in adolescence.

Senior author Julia Boehm, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Chapman University, says that prosocial behavior can influence health by “strengthening children’s social ties and improving psychological functioning by promoting better mood, purpose, feelings of competence, and enhanced capacity to cope with stress.”

“All of these, in turn, serve as resources that may inform health-related choices, as is evidenced by our latest findings,” she notes.

New door to health strategies

Despite the large study sample, the authors note they could not account for many factors, such as parenting or other aspects of the family environment, due to data availability.

However, they adjusted for parent-reported eating behaviors in childhood, along with other contributors to family climate — including socioeconomic factors and parents marital status — which may be influential.

Co-author Laura Kubzansky, Ph.D., MPH, from the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is leading a novel research program on the long-term health impact of prosociality.

She highlights that asset-based interventions can “open the door” to new and creative health promotion strategies that engage youth in ways that speak to their inherent strengths, including values around kindness and cooperation.

“Supporting prosociality in childhood may be a promising health promotion strategy for future consideration,” she encourages.

“We are living through a divisive time, when empathy can feel undervalued. This study offers us an important reminder about the power of kindness and compassion, not only for those who receive it, but also for those who give it,” concludes Qureshi.

“Cultivating these qualities in kids may be an important and novel pathway to promoting public health.”

The research is published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine by Elsevier.