Can Caregiver Feeding Styles Change?

Introduction. The prevalance of overweight and obesity in early childhood continues to rise even though these rates in schoolage children and teens have stabilized. Early childhood overweight or obesity is an independent predictor of adult obesity. Therefore, prevention and treatment intervention programs for young children and their parents are urgently needed but few have been rigorously tested to date.

Objective. This randomized controlled pilot study was undertaken to investigate the immediate effects of a healthy weight prevention intervention on the strategies that parents use to encourage healthy eating patterns with their children, 4-6 years of age.

Subjects and Setting. Nineteen parents of 4-6-year-old children were recruited at two university-affiliated childcare centers from 40 eligible parents over a one month period.

Intervention. Four 25-30-minute audio recordings with age-appropriate information were given over eight weeks to enrolled and participating parents. Experimental group parents received healthy child nutrition and lifestyle information; whereas, parents in the comparison group received child-related health and safety information as a time-control intervention.

Measures. Pre- and post-intervention measures of the parenting strategies included the Caregiver Feeding Style Questionnaire and Healthy Lifestyle Parenting Behavior Report.

Results. Parents in the experimental group reported using more child-centered feeding strategies after participating in the minimally-intensive intervention and Healthy Lifestyle Parenting behaviors increased. These changes in parenting resulted in a shift from negatively correlated measures at baseline (r = -.57, p = .05) to a positive relationship following the intervention (r = .29, p = .36). Additionally, a medium effect size was noted for changes in reported healthy lifestyle parenting behaviors.

Conclusions. This pilot study demonstrated that parenting strategies to encourage healthy eating among young children are amenable to intervention which, in turn, may influence child eating behaviors and weight development in these children.