Assessment of mindfulness in addressing emotional eating and perceived stress among children aged 9-11 years.

Introduction: there is a paucity of studies in the literature examining the relationship between children, mindfulness and diet. In this context, this study was designed to assess emotional eating and perceived stressful situations with mindfulness in children.

Methods: this study was conducted with the participation of 349 children (128 boys, 221 girls) aged 9-11 living in the Karabük province. The study collected data on the participants' sociodemographic information, anthropometric measurements, number of main meals and snacks consumed per day, meal-skipping status, reasons for skipping meals, dietary motivations, and their scores on the Mindfulness Scale for Children (BAU-MSC), the Emotional Eating Scale for Children and Adolescents (EES-C), and the Perceived Stress Scale in Children (8-11 years) (PSS-C).

Results: 58.17 % of the participants had 2 main meals, 30.2 % had 3 or more main meals; 37.5 % consumed 1 snack, 31.5 % consumed 2 snacks. A positive, weakly statistically significant relationship was detected between age and body weight and height. A positive, weakly statistically significant relationship was detected between age and EES-C, anxiety-anger-disappointment subscales and PSS-C scores (r = 0.161; r = 0.178; r = 0.250; p = 0.003; p = 0.001; p = 0.000).

Conclusion: future studies with larger samples are needed to better understand the relationship between mindfulness and emotional eating and perceived stress situations in children.