By Carrie Dennett, MPH, RDN
Social media’s negative effects on mental health and eating disorder risk in children and adolescents have received significant media and research attention. Similarly, there’s a body of research exploring how food-related parenting styles influence both body weight and eating disorder risk in children and adolescents.
A 2025 narrative literature review offered a look at the impacts of both parenting style and social media—two of the complex, multifactorial forces shaping pediatric eating behaviors.1 The authors make the case that establishing a healthy relationship with food requires looking beyond simple calorie balance. Instead, they emphasize three intersecting domains: the neurobiology of appetite, the psychological environment created by parenting styles, and the pervasive modern landscape of social media.
The Neurobiology of Eating: Balancing Need and Pleasure
To understand how external factors disrupt children’s diets, the authors first detail the intrinsic biological mechanisms that govern appetite—a process they call the “Cycle of Nutrition.” Human food intake is controlled by a delicate integration of homeostatic (energy-balancing) and hedonic (reward-driven) signals, operating across three phases:
1. Hunger: Driven by actual or perceived energy deficits, this phase is largely mediated by the hormone ghrelin, which is produced in the stomach. Ghrelin acts on the hypothalamus to stimulate orexigenic (appetite-increasing) neurons while suppressing appetite-inhibiting pathways. Crucially, ghrelin also triggers the brain’s reward circuit, driving an increase of dopamine. This sparks the desire to eat for pleasure (hedonic hunger), even when the body doesn’t strictly need calories.
2. Acute satiety: As an individual eats a meal, physical and chemical signals initiate fullness. Gastric distension sends mechanical signals via the vagus nerve to the brain. Simultaneously, the gut releases hormones like cholecystokinin (CCK), which signals the brainstem to end the meal.
3. Prolonged satiety: This phase maintains fullness between meals. It relies on metabolic signals, such as blood nutrient levels, and hormones, such as leptin (released by fat cells), GLP-1, and PYY (secreted in the intestines). These inhibit hunger circuits and keep appetite at bay.
When this biological cycle functions naturally, children self-regulate effectively. However, the authors point out that environmental factors—particularly how parents manage food and the media children consume—can easily override these internal cues.
Parenting Styles and Feeding Practices
The family environment is the primary training ground for a child’s dietary habits, especially during the critical “first thousand days” of life (conception to age two).2 The review draws a clear distinction between general parenting styles (the emotional climate of the home) and specific parental feeding practices (the strategies used to manage meals).
Authoritative vs Controlling Environments
Research overwhelmingly supports an authoritative approach—characterized by high warmth, emotional responsiveness, two-way communication, and clear but flexible boundaries. This is a contrast from an authoritarian approach, which includes strict rules and little warmth, or a permissive approach, which has warmth and affection but few boundaries.3,4 Children raised in authoritative environments tend to have a more intuitive relationship with food and a more nutritious diet.3
Conversely, controlling or restrictive feeding practices consistently backfire. Parents often use overt restriction (expressly forbidding highly palatable, sugary foods) out of a well-intentioned desire to help their kids be healthy. However, data shows this approach disrupts a child’s internal satiety cues. When certain foods are heavily restricted, they become “forbidden fruit,” leading to compensatory reactions in children, including emotional overeating, eating when not hungry, excessive sugar seeking, and an increased risk of binge eating disorder in adolescence. In other words, coercive control actively undermines the child’s ability to self-regulate.
Structure Without Restriction
Instead of strict control, the authors advocate for structure-based feeding practices, closely aligning with Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding.5 In this model, parents control the what, when, and where of feeding (providing healthy options at regular times), but the child retains total autonomy over whether and how much to eat.6,7 Studies indicate that when parents practices that provide structure and positive modeling without coercive control are associated with healthier and more sustainable eating patterns over time in their children.8
The review also notes that feeding dynamics are bidirectional: a child’s natural “food fussiness” can trigger parental anxiety, leading to more restrictive practices, which in turn exacerbates the fussiness. Breaking this cycle requires education that helps parents trust their child’s innate hunger cues.
The Dual-Edged Sword of Social Media
A core focus of the review is how digital environments complicate pediatric nutrition. As the authors describe it, social media acts as a ubiquitous “third parent,” heavily influencing both how youth view food and how parents approach feeding.
Impact on Children and Adolescents
For youth, the digital landscape is fraught with psychological risks. Engagement-driven algorithms create “content funnels” that continuously feed users increasingly extreme dietary material. A casual search for fitness tips can quickly devolve into a feed dominated by restrictive diets, unrealistic body ideals, and orthorexia (an unhealthy obsession with eating “pure” or “clean” foods). Furthermore, social media is an unregulated marketplace that seamlessly blends advertising with influencer content, creating an environment that not only spreads misinformation but also fosters body dissatisfaction, social comparison, and an increased vulnerability to eating disorders.9,10
Impact on Parents
Social media has also fundamentally altered how caregivers seek nutritional guidance. The authors highlight that modern parents frequently bypass traditional clinical advice in favor of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Influencer-driven messaging often blurs the lines of epistemic trust, presenting anecdotal or rigid, rule-based dietary practices with the same authority as pediatric science.
This digital migration can paralyze parents with information overload and anxiety about feeding their children “perfectly.” However, the authors note that social media isn’t entirely negative—it can also provide parents with vital emotional support, community solidarity, and creative, flexible ideas for complementary feeding, provided the sources are credible.
Conclusions and Clinical Implications
The convergence of biological drives, parental influence, and algorithm-driven media creates a modern nutritional landscape that is vastly more complex than in previous decades. To prevent or address pediatric feeding disorders—altered oral food intake that is inappropriate for age and associated with medical, nutritional, feeding skill and/or psychosocial dysfunction11—the authors conclude that health care systems must adapt their approach to family education.
Instead of handing out printed dietary guidelines, dietitians and pediatricians can be more effective when they do the following:
• Adopt trust-based approaches. Clinicians should use positive, flexible communication that empowers parents rather than making them feel judged. Fostering an open dialogue helps alleviate parental anxiety and promotes an intuitive approach to feeding.
• Enter digital spaces. Because parents are already turning to the internet for advice, dietitians and other health care professionals need to establish a strong, accessible presence in digital environments. They must combine scientific credibility with the relatable, emotional tone typical of peer groups to effectively counter misinformation.
• Promote digital literacy. Preventing eating disorders now requires teaching media literacy alongside nutritional education. Empowering youth to critically evaluate the food- and body-related content they see on their feeds can help them develop a healthy relationship with body image and nutrition.
Ultimately, preventing pediatric feeding disorders requires integrating family dynamics, school-based education, and responsible digital engagement. Only by honoring a child’s biological autonomy while curating a supportive physical and digital environment can we help parents—and their children—create lifelong healthy dietary patterns.
— Carrie Dennett, MPH, RDN, is editor of Today’s Dietitian.
References
1. Dessì A, Petza S, Di Carlo A, et al. Parenting style and social media: impact on children’s dietary patterns. Nutrients. 2025;17(20):3254.
2. Schwarzenberg SJ, Georgieff MK; COMMITTEE ON NUTRITION. Advocacy for improving nutrition in the first 1000 days to support childhood development and adult health. Pediatrics. 2018;141(2):e20173716.
3. Scaglioni S, De Cosmi V, Ciappolino V, Parazzini F, Brambilla P, Agostoni C. Factors influencing children’s eating behaviours. Nutrients. 2018;10(6):706.
4. Lavrič M, Naterer A. The power of authoritative parenting: a cross-national study of effects of exposure to different parenting styles on life satisfaction. Child Youth Serv Rev. 2020;116:105274.
5. The Satter Division of Responsibility in Feeding. Ellyn Satter Institute website. https://www.ellynsatterinstitute.org/how-to-feed/division-of-responsibility/. Accessed July 21, 2026.
6. Satter E. The feeding relationship: problems and interventions. J Pediatr. 1990;117(2 Pt 2):S181-S189.
7. Ruder EH, Lohse B. The sDOR.2-6y™ is a valid measure of nutrition risk independent of BMI-for-age z-score and household food security status in preschool aged-children. Nutrients. 2024;16(6):767.
8. Hübner HL, Bartelmeß T. Associations of sugar-related food parenting practices and parental feeding styles with prospective dietary behavior of children and adolescents: a systematic review of the literature from 2017 to 2023. Front Public Health. 2024;12:1382437.
9. Dane A, Bhatia K. The social media diet: a scoping review to investigate the association between social media, body image and eating disorders amongst young people. PLOS Glob Public Health. 2023;3(3):e0001091.
10. Chu J, Ganson KT, Testa A, et al. Screen time, problematic screen use, and eating disorder symptoms among early adolescents: findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Eat Weight Disord. 2024 Sep 4;29(1):57.
11. Goday PS, Huh SY, Silverman A, et al. Pediatric feeding disorder: consensus definition and conceptual framework. J Pediatr Gastroenterol Nutr. 2019;68(1):124-129.