Maternal Feeding Practices & The Effect on Children’s Eating Behaviors
Open Access
- Author:
- Davila Menendez, Viviana
- Area of Honors:
- Nutritional Sciences
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Kathleen Loralee Keller, Thesis Supervisor
Alison D Gernand, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- childhood obesity
parental feeding practices
susceptibility to obesity
middle childhood
eating rate
children's eating rate
child appetitive traits
maternal restrictive feeding practices
restriction
maternal restriction
energy intake
appetitive traits
child emotional overeating
emotional overeating
overeating
Child Feeding Questionnaire
Children’s Eating Behavior Questionnaire
obesity risk
high food approach
food approach - Abstract:
- Childhood obesity is one of the world’s greatest public health challenges because it leads to several debilitating chronic diseases as well as premature mortality. Parents have a huge influence on children’s risk for obesity, especially through parental feeding practices. The Behavioral Susceptibility Theory is an evidence-based framework for understanding how genes and the environment interact to influence children’s susceptibility to obesity. While prior studies have assessed contributions such as individual child characteristics and parental feeding practices, few studies have been done in middle childhood. Few studies have been done that have directly measured children's eating rate at laboratory meals. This thesis aimed to examine the relationships between child appetitive traits, maternal restrictive feeding practices, and laboratory energy intake. It was hypothesized that greater maternal restrictive feeding practices and weight would be positively associated with children’s laboratory eating and appetitive traits and would mediate the association between child emotional overeating and lab intake. The data for this thesis was collected from the Food and Brain study, a within-subjects, longitudinal study with repeated measures that was designed to identify neural and cognitive contributions to pre-adolescent weight gain. At the screening visit, height and weight were measured for both parent and child. On visits 2 through 5, children received a meal that varied by portion size, delivered in a pre-established randomly assigned, counterbalanced order. This thesis will use data from the baseline (smallest) meal condition which consisted of macaroni and cheese, chicken nuggets, lightly buttered broccoli, and red grapes. All meals were video recorded and coded behaviorally to assess the rate of food intake. We analyzed the Child Feeding Questionnaire, the Children’s Eating Behavior Questionnaire, and the behavioral coding data from the baseline meal. The data analysis consisted of correlations and t-tests. A total of 59 children were included in the analyses. Children were on average over 7 years of age. Most of the sample were girls at a low risk for obesity. Most of children were white, and many families were classified as middle class. The mean maternal BMI was 28.6 kg/m2. There were no correlations between maternal restriction or maternal weight and children’s energy intake or eating rate at laboratory meals. Children’s emotional overeating correlation was also not associated with measures of laboratory intake. Due to these results, no mediation analyses were performed. These results do not align with previous literature, which has found that maternal restriction is associated with increased eating in the absence of hunger in girls. Future researchers should continue to investigate and design longitudinal studies to thoroughly develop methods to minimize the risk for obesity in children with high food approach appetitive traits. Also, since eating rate is a heritable phenotype related to weight, further studies can incorporate measures of maternal eating rate, since our study only assessed the child’s eating rate while they were eating alone in the lab. It is possible children’s eating behaviors would differ outside the lab when eating with their families.