Media coverage of food allergy fatalities contributes to parent, child anxieties
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“We were interested in factors that might prompt feelings of anxiety for parents of food-allergic children and suspected that media consumption might contribute,” author Jennifer J. Bute, PhD, associate professor in the department of communication studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indiana, told Healio.
Bute and her co-author, Nicole Martins, PhD, associate professor at the Media School at Indiana University at Bloomington, recruited 276 parents of children aged 2 to 18 years from 25 food allergy Facebook groups, 12 LinkedIn food allergy groups, the SnackSafely newsletter and the Mechanical Turk website. The parents were aged 22 to 58 years (average age, 38 years), 74% were mothers, and 82% were white.
These parents answered a survey on fright-related feelings and concern for personal safety that their children felt reacting to news stories about fatalities related to food allergies.
“Media coverage often focuses on stories of fatalities. One of the higher-profile fatalities in the U.S. was the experience of Elija Silvera, whose family has worked tirelessly to improve food-allergy training for childcare providers,” Bute said.
Questions included whether children experienced any concern, fear or upset because of these news stories. The researchers also asked how frequently children watched news on television as well as how often these parents watched television news or accessed these stories via social media themselves.
According to the researchers, 40% of the parents watched television news every day, and 40% accessed news stories on social media.
Parents reported how closely they followed news stories about fatalities from food allergies on a scale of 0 (not at all closely) to 4 (very, very closely). On average, parents followed these news stories very closely (mean, 2.28; standard deviation = 1.1). Parents and the researchers both reported that children watched significant amounts of news as well.
“Contrary to what many adults assume, children do watch and pay attention to the news. Joanne Cantor, PhD, an emeritus professor at University of Wisconsin, has studied children’s news viewing habits for decades,” Martins told Healio, adding that Cantor’s work shows that children watch news and often are frightened by what they see.
Also, Nielsen ratings indicate that approximately a half million youth in the U.S. aged 2 to 17 years watch the news on any given day.
“Several studies show that children’s exposure to news increases in times of national crisis, like times of war or COVID-19,” Martins said. “Younger children are likely watching these stories with their parents, but older children and adolescents seek out news stories on their own.”
According to the researchers, 32% of the parents said their child was frightened by a news story about a food-allergy fatality. After controlling for demographics, parent behaviors and overall television viewing, children’s exposure to television news was a significant predictor for children’s fright-related feelings and concern for personal safety. However, the survey did not ask about children’s exposure to social media.
“It is certainly possible that exposure to social media results in greater or lesser impacts, but that question can only be addressed with studies of children and not their parents,” Martins said.
The researchers further found a significant correlation between parental fear and child fear (r = 0.169; P = .005). In rating this fear on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 3 (very afraid), parents reported significantly more intense fright-related feelings (mean, 1.27) than the fear they reported for their children (mean, 1.12; P < .05).
Thus, although their children were the ones at risk for fatal anaphylaxis, the parents rated their own fear as greater than their children’s. Also, this fear was related to specific news content, not overall television viewing. Yet the researchers additionally said their study suggests that parents influence their children’s reactions.
Parents who were heavy viewers of television news were significantly more fearful and concerned about the safety of their children than parents who did not watch as much news, the researchers added.
“For parents, we did ask about television and social media exposure,” Martins said. “However, it was not the platform or amount of time spent with media that predicted parents’ fright-related feelings or concern for their child’s safety. The best predictor of these two outcomes was how much they paid attention to the stories, regardless of where the stories came from.”
An additional 18% of the variance in parental fear and 8% of the variance in concern for their child’s safety could be explained by how closely parents followed news stories about food fatalities.
Overall, the researchers said, the fright responses that parents had to news stories about food fatalities were a strong, positive predictor of their children’s fright-related reactions and concern for their own safety.
However, the researchers noted that due to the correlational nature of their study, they could not exclude the possibility that parents who already fear something happening to their food-allergic child might seek out such stories in the media to find out more information.
Bute also said that the nature of their sample including a preponderance of white women among their respondents limits the generalizability of their results, but future studies could explore whether similar patterns might be found in more diverse groups.
“An important next step is to explore whether we see similar patterns in other samples, including more racially diverse samples and samples that include parents who themselves have food allergies,” Bute said, adding that parents with their own food allergies may have different perceptions of child fear than those surveyed in this study.
The researchers additionally believe that their results could help doctors and families alike cope with food allergies and the fears and anxieties they provoke.
“Allergists can suggest that parents be cautious of the media they watch,” Bute said. “We tend to think that more information is better, but news media that prompts fear could make parents, and their children, feel unnecessarily anxious.”
For more information:
Jennifer J. Bute, PhD, can be reached at jjbute@iupui.
Nicole Martins, PhD, can be reached at nicomart@indiana.edu.