Who should choose children's mid-afternoon snack: the mothers or their children?

International audience

English. Children's mid-afternoon snack is usually characterized by the consumption of fatty and sweetened foods (Anses, 2017). To the best of our knowledge, no study has investigated differences or similarities in terms of nutritional quality of mid-afternoon snack choices made by children or by their mothers. Our first goal was to compare the nutritional quality of children's mid-afternoon snack choices made by mothers or by themselves. Our second goal was to see whether the potential differences were maintained or not when mothers and children were informed about the product's nutritional quality. We invited 95 mother-child dyads (children mean age = 9.4±0.10) to choose in the laboratory one beverage (among 6) and two food items (among 9) for the mid-afternoon snack, first for themselves and then for the other dyad's member. After an explanation of the Nutri-Score label (French nutritional labelling system), we invited participants to choose again one beverage and two food items for themselves and for the other dyad's member, among products labelled with the Nutri-Score. Participants were informed at the beginning of the experiment that one of the four choices (the two selected by the participant for himself and the two selected by the other dyad's member for this participant) would be randomly selected to be consumed. To answer our questions, we focused here on the nutritional quality of the children's snacks. We found that children's choices for themselves were lower in terms of nutritional quality than mothers' choices for their child (P < 0.001). The difference between the nutritional quality of choices made by children for themselves and those made by their mothers was not reduced after labelling (P=0.86). Thus, in terms of nutritional quality it seems preferable that mothers choose the mid-afternoon snack of their child.