Professor Emma Haycraft
Professor of Psychology and Public Health - Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Emma explores ways to support the healthy development of children and adolescents. Her passion is children’s eating behaviour and caregiver feeding practices. Much of her work considers the interactions between caregivers and young people – particularly in relation to feeding – but her research broadly focuses on ways to promote optimal early childhood development and how best to support caregivers to facilitate this.
In recognition of her commitment to excellent teaching and learning, Emma is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Creating practical solutions to help caregivers address fussy eating in young children – encouraging healthy habits for life
Obesity is common in the UK – it’s estimated that one in five children aged 10-11 are living with obesity. This alarming statistic has put healthy eating more firmly on people’s radars with caregivers increasingly wanting to help their children to develop good eating habits for life.
My work tries to address the support gap, drawing on more than a decade of research to provide practical ways to overcome some of the more common pitfalls.
I'm really proud of the Child Feeding Guide – created in collaboration with my colleagues, Dr Gemma Witcomb and Professor Claire Farrow.
It’s a free online resource for caregivers which shares research-informed tips and tools – and is recommended by the NHS, British Heart Foundation as well as various healthcare and family information services and online parents’ groups.
Another practical tool I’ve co-developed – with Professor Claire Farrow – is Vegetable Maths Masters, a free app for children. Drawing on our research, it combines fun games to practise maths skills with exposure to vegetables which has been shown to help children to learn to like – and to eat – more of these foods.
It’s really important to educate and explain to caregivers that not all children will eat everything and that it can take time to learn to like foods, particularly unfamiliar or bitter tastes. It’s a typical part of children’s development and, for the vast majority, it's absolutely nothing to worry about.
We all eat, so everyone can relate to research that looks at eating behaviours. My work is helping families – and especially children – to eat more healthily.
We also provide CPD-UK accredited online training for health and childcare professionals, and contribute to a range of publications including Danone Institute International’s Nurturing Children’s Healthy Eating report (2018) and a scientific statement for the American Heart Association, Caregiver influences on eating behaviours in young children.
A tangent we’ve also been exploring is children’s avid eating behaviours – children who are constantly hungry and asking for food – via the APPETItE project. We’ve also looked at the emerging prevalence of children’s unhealthy snacking and screen use behaviours and how to support families to instil healthy behaviours in their school-age children.
Other projects I’ve recently been involved in have investigated child nutrition and child development in Kenya, Peru and South Africa. We’ve worked with local partners to develop ways to foster optimal child development and feeding, while providing effective support for caregivers.
My research journey
I completed my undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Birmingham.
I joined º¬Ðß²ÝÊÓƵ, in 2007, as a Lecturer in Psychology - and was delighted to achieve my chair in 2022, becoming Professor of Psychology and Public Health.
Throughout my career, it’s been really important to me to share my research findings with those who will benefit from them. I’ve always been motivated to address real problems and – working with partners and stakeholders – find practical solutions.
