How Childhood Compassion is Linked to Teenage Eating Habits

September 1, 2025 17

Children with caregiving nature may keep up healthy eating patterns as teenagers, that shows a connection between compassion and diet.

How Childhood Compassion is Linked to Teenage Eating Habits

Children who portrayed with prosocial behaviors like helping others, cooperation, being kind, and caring were found to sustain healthy eating patterns during their adolescence. This data was based on a new cohort study of children aged 5 to 17 (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Kind Kids, Healthy Teens: Child Prosociality and Fruit and Vegetable Intake

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The findings from the study appeared in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier, suggest that nurturing selfless behaviors in children could be an effective way to promote healthy dietary patterns during their teenage years.

The study used records from the Millennium Cohort Study, a national study of UK-born children followed from birth onward. As reported by their parents, kids (ages 5, 7, and 11) who consistently exhibited generous behaviors like caregiving, helping, and sharing were more likely to eat fruits and vegetables in their dietary routine during adolescence (ages 14 and 17).

Compassion Might be the Key to Better Diets

“Too often, we focus on what is going wrong in young people’s lives, but what we hear from them time and time again is that they are tired of that narrative. They want us adults to pay more attention to what is going right, including what they bring to their families and communities,” says lead investigator Farah Qureshi, ScD, MHS, Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“Prior research has found that behaviors that help others (like volunteering) are related to better health in older adults. We wanted to understand whether these types of activities benefit youth as well, focusing on a broader range of prosocial behaviors, like acts of kindness, cooperation, and caring for others.

In our current research, we found that children who consistently displayed more of these kinds of positive social behaviors at any age were more likely to maintain healthy eating habits into their teenage years, a time when dietary choices set patterns that can shape lifelong health.

Senior author Julia K. Boehm, PhD, Department of Psychology, Chapman University, adds, “Prosocial behaviors, such as being considerate of others’ feelings, sharing, helping if someone is hurt or upset, being kind, and volunteering to help others, can influence health by strengthening children’s social ties and improving psychological functioning by promoting better mood, purpose, feelings of competence, and enhanced capacity to cope with stress. All of these, in turn, serve as resources that may inform health-related choices, as is evidenced by our latest findings.”

Selfless Acts Can Promote Healthy Plates

“Although we could not account for many of these factors due to data availability, we adjusted for parent-reported eating behaviors in childhood, along with other contributors to family climate (e.g., socioeconomic factors, parent marital status), which may account for some residual confounding,” the authors explain.

The analysis highlights a potential health asset – prosocial behavior – that can promote positive outcomes across the life course. These longitudinal findings support prior cross-sectional work that found youth prosocial behavior was related to healthier behaviors, including dietary patterns.

Co-author Laura D. Kubzansky, PhD, MPH, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, points out, “Asset-based interventions can open the door to new and creative health promotion strategies that engage youth in ways that speak to their inherent strengths, including shared values around kindness and cooperation. Supporting prosociality in childhood may be a promising health promotion strategy for future consideration.”

Dr. Qureshi concludes, “We are living through a divisive time, when empathy can feel undervalued. This study offers us an important reminder about the power of kindness and compassion not only for those who receive it, but also for those who give it. Cultivating these qualities in kids may be an important and novel pathway to promoting public health.”

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