Feeding Minds: Exploring How Adults Shape Children’s Perceptions of Food through Everyday Conversations

This study explores the dynamics of food-related discourse between adults and children in British families, utilizing the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) database to analyze naturally occurring conversations. By employing corpus linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), and data science methods, the research examines how food is discussed, identifying patterns in vocabulary use, conversation initiation, and the linguistic framing of eating behaviours, which can exert lasting influences on future wellbeing. The findings reveal that the food-related vocabulary of children and adults mostly overlaps, centring around staple foods. However, there are notable differences: children frequently mention sweet foods and express desires for them, whereas adults use a broader and more sophisticated vocabulary, including terms related to meal preparation and diverse cuisines. Notably, although children place particular emphasis on sweet foods, adults too frequently mention them highlighting that both groups engage with sugary treats, albeit with different discursive functions. Moreover, adults are nearly twice as likely as children to initiate food-related conversations, reinforcing their role as primary facilitators of food discourse. An analysis of the different usages and patterns of the verb eat highlights the instructional and regulatory nature of adult speech, with frequent use of imperatives emphasizing that children must finish their food, and conditional statements linking eating to rewards or consequences. These patterns suggest that adults may shape children’s perceptions of portion sizes, satiety, and mealtime behaviour through epistemic primacy. Additionally, gendered differences in food-related praise reflect broader cultural expectations, with boys receiving more frequent positive reinforcement for eating.