There is growing evidence that parents are very important in shaping a child's eating behaviors. But do overweight parents of overweight children encourage their offspring to eat more than parents of normal weight do?

A recent study performed at the University of Michigan and reported in the September 2006 issue of The Journal of Pediatrics examined this question by documenting children's responses to parental prompting to eat.

In the study, 71 mother/child teams were given four foods for the child to sample. Two of the foods, a bag of potato chips and a Twinkie, were familiar foods to the child. Two others, a bag of vegetable chips and a Chinese cake, were not familiar.

Researchers counted the number of times that mothers prompted their child to take another bite - whether the prompt was verbal or non-verbal. They found that obese mothers did not prompt their children more frequently than mothers of normal weight. But those children whose mothers were obese responded to parental prompting more often than did children of normal weight parents.

While the reason that children of overweight mothers were more responsive to prompting to eat food remains unknown, the researchers speculated that it might be because the children may have inherited genes that make them more responsive to environmental cues to eat. If research bears this out, obese parents should be more careful about environmental cues, such as junk food advertising - or their own encouragement for their child to eat.