Parental Food Choices and Engagement in Raising Children’s Awareness of Sustainable Behaviors in Urban Poland

Abstract

Promoting sustainable food consumption patterns and understanding factors driving environmentally-friendly food choices is one of the challenges of public health nutrition policies in the 2020s and crucial for the future wellbeing of humans, food systems and the planet as a whole. To assess the impact of sustainability issues on the behaviors of parents living with young school-aged children in Poland a CAWI survey of 1035 adults in urban areas was conducted. A clustering procedure revealed that two of the identified clusters (73% of the sample) rated sustainability factors as important when purchasing food for children but only one of these clusters (29% of the sample) was actively engaged in raising their child’s awareness about sustainable behaviors. The third cluster (27% of the sample) had no intentions to teach their children about food sustainability because of lack of time or distrust in these topics. More than 80% of the sample agreed that parents share a responsibility in teaching children about the links between food, health and environment. Principles of healthy and sustainable diets should be incorporated into public health programmes to empower family members to engage in raising their children’s awareness and adopt more healthy and environmentally-friendly food consumption practices.