Assessing Parental Feeding Strategies Across Different Ethnic Groups

With the increased emphasis on childhood obesity, research efforts have looked at the feeding styles of parents or caregivers to help understand “why” obesity occurs. Often parental concerns and control of high fat foods and sweets can have unexpected consequences. When parents take too much control over children’s feeding patterns (restrictive feeding), children may lose the ability to self-regulate energy intake. The model describes what may be happening.

Restricting feeding is a parent centered strategy. However, focusing on only one aspect of feeding (i.e., parental restrictiveness) excludes other important factors that describe the feeding behavior of parents.

Child centered strategies are often more effective than parent centered strategies for teaching positive feeding behaviors. Consistent with other parenting models, child centered feeding strategies such as reasoning, complimenting and providing the child with choices encourage internalization. Parent centered strategies such as demands, threats, and rewards discourage internalization or self-regulation by the child.

Dr. Sheryl Hughes at the USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center and her co-workers previously developed the Caregiver’s Feeding Styles Questionnaire to measure parental feeding practices in two ethnic groups, African-American and Hispanic. (The questionnaire and scoring information can be found at www.kidsnutrition.org/faculty/hughes.htm.

They also published an article in the March, 2006 issue of Appetite ( www.elsevier.com (search for title... "Measuring feeding in low income African American and Hispanic parents") which uses the Caregiver’s Feeding Styles Questionnaire to assess different aspects of parental feeding styles for African-American and Hispanic parents. With this measure, parents are given a score for each of 3 subscales (parent-centered/high control, parent-centered/contingency management, and child-centered feeding practices). By using this scale, parents can obtain a better idea about their personal feeding style.