Mothers who push their toddlers to eat more at snack time may end up with chubbier children by the age of 3, according to a U.S. study.

Researchers whose findings appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition said such parents might end up overriding their child’s ability to listen to their body’s natural “satiety signals” – the brain’s way of saying it’s time to stop eating.

It wasn’t clear whether parental pushiness actually led to excess weight gain, and the weight differences in the study were small. But a number of previous studies have pointed to links between “controlling” mealtime behavior by parents and their children’s risk of being overweight.

Toddlers of course are notoriously finicky eaters, and parents often worry their child might not be eating enough, said Julie Lumeng, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the study.

“So their toddler doesn’t want to eat, but parents are saying, ‘Come on honey. Eat, eat, eat!’” she said.

Previous studies relied on questionnaires that essentially asked parents whether they were pushy at the dinner table, but Lumeng and her colleagues decided to observe what mothers were actually doing.

To do that, they had 1,218 mothers come to their research lab, then videotaped them during a 10-minute snack with their child. Families came at three different times – when the child was 15 months old, 2 years old and 3 years old.

Overall, mothers who were the most “intrusive” during the snacks tended to have heavier children, even when factors such as family income and race were taken into account.

Lower-income and minority children generally have a higher risk of obesity than white, middle-class children, and studies have found that their mothers also tend to be more controlling at mealtimes, the authors noted.

But the association between pushiness and weight was a small one.

If all of a mother’s snack-time “prompts” were of the assertive variety, her child would move up slightly on the body mass index scale, a measure of weight against height. The difference was akin to moving to the 57th from the 50th percentile, Lumeng said.

She also noted that since the research was done in a lab, it doesn’t reflect what happens at home. To address this, she and her colleagues are starting a study in which they will have low-income families video typical meals at home.

For now, Lumeng suggests that parents follow current expert thinking: give young children healthy food, but allow them to control how much they eat at a time. “Children will naturally eat the proper amount. Often, the kids [whom] parents are worried about are actually a very healthy weight,” she said.