Perceived obstacles to implementing healthy eating habits amongst pre-adolescent Indian children – a parental perspective

This study explored the mothers’ (N = 510) perceived impact of socialization agents, social media, relatives and parental eating habits on teaching healthy eating habits among pre-adolescents in urban India. Linear regression was applied to analyse the direct relationships, and Process Macros Models 1 and 4 were used to analyse the mediating and moderating relationships on SPSS (26.0) software. Findings suggest a significant association of the predictor variables with the healthy eating habits of the children, with a negative association of the mediator (parental control) and moderator (parental role model), implying that with an increase in the predictor variables, there is a decrease in the healthy eating habits of the pre-adolescents. The study’s originality lies in involving the children’s immediate family as the unit of analysis, which can further act as the base for designing interventions or measuring outcomes in future studies.