Nurturing Needs Study: Parenting Food Motivated Children

High levels of food motivation among young children are heritable, track over time, and associated with elevated risks of unhealthy eating and obesity. Despite significant growth of family-based obesity prevention efforts, the evidence base is remarkably scant on parenting highly food motivated children to prevent obesity and poor dietary outcomes. The goal of this investigation is to generate a robust basic science evidence for parenting highly food motivated children to prevent excessive dietary intakes and body mass index (BMI) gains during the preschool years. Using a prospective cohort design, this investigation follow 205 caregiver/child dyads over 18 months as children transition from preschool to elementary school, when significant numbers of children begin to experience problems of poor diet quality and obesity. Children with varying food motivation will be recruited to understand whether highly food motivated children have different needs than other children. A multi-method approach will use state-of-the-art measures, including ecological momentary assessment, to comprehensively investigate the amount, types, and consistency of food parenting practices (i.e., specific, goal-oriented behaviors) needed to prevent food motivated behaviors, excessive dietary intake, and BMI gains in children. Specifically, the role of structure (i.e., theoretically supportive) and its differentiation from more coercive types of food parenting control will be comprehensively characterized.

Inclusion criteria

• Child ages 4 or 5 years at baseline;
• Parent/ primary caregiver with legal representation (having 50% or more custody of child);
• Parent/primary caregiver reporting primary responsibility for child feeding outside of childcare (being with child when they are eating at least two times daily);
• Caregiver with a cell phone that can be used to send and receive text messages. If there is more than one age-eligible child in the family, we will ask the caregiver to pick the index child.

Exclusion criteria

• Parent/primary caregiver <18 years of age;
• Child history of major food allergies (e.g., peanuts);
• Child medication use (e.g., insulin), developmental disability (e.g., autism) or medical condition(s) (e.g., diabetes) known to affect food intake and growth;
• Foster child.