Predicting childrenʹs meal preferences: How much do parents know?

We investigate how accurate parents are at predicting their childrenʹs meal preferences and what cues best describe parents’ predictions. In Study 1, 30 parents predicted their childrenʹs school lunch choices from actual school menus. Parents’ prediction accuracy matched the stability of childrenʹs meal choices (assessed in a 4-month retest), implying that accuracy was as high as can be expected. Parents appeared to make their predictions by using specific knowledge about their childʹs likes and by projecting their own preferences. In Study 2, we asked 58 parents to predict their childrenʹs preferences for 30 randomly drawn school meals, and compared them to the childrenʹs actual preferences. Again, parents showed high prediction accuracy and predicted the lunches their children liked correctly more often than the disliked ones. Overall, parents’ accuracy in predicting their childrenʹs food preferences was as good as or better than found in previous preference prediction studies that used less ecologically relevant task domains.