Maternal and child roles in the feeding relationship: what are mothers doing?

One area with strong potential to prevent or treat early childhood obesity is feeding dynamics. The concept of feeding dynamics includes 2 central components: caregiver feeding role (how, when, where, and what caregivers feed their children) and child eating behaviors (how much, when, what, and whether to eat of what is offered). The feeding dynamic approach was initially proposed as the trust model by Ellyn Satter. In this approach, caregivers are responsible for offering nutritious foods and exposing children to new foods, providing structured snack and mealtimes to decrease indiscriminate eating, identifying a designated area for eating or drinking within the home, sitting and eating with children, and keeping the eating atmosphere pleasant. Children are responsible for what to eat and how much (or even whether) to eat from the food provided. Unlike conventional interventions for obesity, the feeding dynamic emphasizes how to feed, placing less weight on conventional intervention areas such as portion sizes and low-fat or low-calorie food options as well as discourages excessively restrictive feeding practices. A growing body of literature reveals a complex relationship between controlling feeding behaviors and the child’s weight. In particular, overly restrictive behaviors significantly reduce a child’s ability to self-regulate their energy intake and result in weight gain or a higher body mass index (BMI). In order to examine the potential of a feeding dynamic approach to reduce childhood obesity in young children, it would be useful to know the extent caregivers already perform these roles as well as the relationships between these roles, other maternal feeding and eating practices, concerns about the child being or becoming overweight, and demographic variables. Therefore, the objective of this brief report is to provide this information and a foundation on which a feeding dynamic intervention can be developed. Methods