Food and general neophobia in Swedish families: Parent-child comparisons and relationships with serving specific foods

The aims were to investigate the occurrence of food and general neophobia in Swedish families with children 2-17 years of age, parent-child correlations with respect to neophobia and the relationships between neophobia and the reported serving of specific foods in the family. A group of 370 randomly selected families from two Swedish towns (stratified, 185 from each) were invited and 57 (15%) participated. The results are based on the Food and General Neophobia Scales (Pliner & Hobden, 1992), parental ratings of child food neophobia and an ad hoc Food Frequency Questionnaire. The overall levels of neophobia were relatively low for both children and parents. There were only a few significant gender differences with respect to Food Neophobia but fathers and boys scored numerically higher than did mothers and girls on several items in the Food Neophobia Scale. The children, particularly boys, showed significantly higher Food and General Neophobia than their parents. Both Food and General Neophobia tended to decrease with increasing age among the children. Families were divided according to whether specific foods had been served or not. This classification showed virtually no relationship with the degree of food neophobia of family members. However, the higher the food neophobia in mothers and children, the fewer of the listed uncommon foods had been served in the family. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited