Cognitive and affective factors linking mothers' perceived weight history to child feeding

The Relationships between Caregivers’ Concern about Child Weight and Their Non-Responsive Feeding Practices: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: It is unclear whether caregivers’ concern about child weight impacts their non-responsive feeding practices. This systematic review aimed to examine their relationships. Methods: A systematic search of PubMed, Embase, PsycINFO, Web of Science core collection, CINAHL and grey literature was conducted from inception to March 2022, following PRISMA guidelines. Data synthesis was performed using a semi-quantitative approach and a meta-analysis. Results: A total of 35 studies with 22,933 respondents were included in the review for semi-quantitative analyses. Thirty-four studies examined 52 associations between concern about child weight and restriction with 40 statistically significant associations being observed. A total of 34 relationships between concern about child weight and pressure to eat were investigated, with 12 being statistically significant. The pooled regression coefficients (β) demonstrated that caregivers’ concern about child overweight was positively associated with restriction (β = 0.22; 95%CI: 0.12, 0.31), negatively associated with use of food as a reward (β = −0.06; 95%CI: −0.11, −0.01), and not statistically associated with pressure to eat (β = −0.05; 95%CI: −0.13, 0.04). The pooled odds ratios (ORs) indicated that caregivers who were concerned about child overweight were found to use restrictive feeding more often (OR = 2.34; 95%CI: 1.69, 3.23), while less frequently adopting pressure to eat (OR = 0.76; 95%CI: 0.59, 0.98) compared with those without concerns. The results also showed that caregivers who were concerned about child underweight were more likely to force their children to eat (OR = 1.83; 95%CI: 1.44, 2.33) than those without concerns. Conclusion: Caregivers’ concern about child weight may be an important risk factor for non-responsive feeding practices. Thus, interventions are needed to focus on managing and relieving caregivers’ excessive concern about child weight, especially overweight, which may optimize feeding practices and subsequently contribute to child health.

Association of parental guilt with harmful versus healthful eating and feeding from a virtual reality buffet

OBJECTIVE

Parents often report guilt about what they feed their child, but no studies have examined how this guilt might affect their child-feeding or own eating behavior. Some studies suggest that guilt motivates healthy behaviors, yet others show that guilt impairs the self-control needed to abstain from unhealthy behaviors.

METHOD

One hundred ninety parents reported how guilty they felt about their current child-feeding habits. Parents then chose food for their child in a virtual reality buffet and reported their intentions to improve child-feeding and own eating behavior in the future. Finally, parents were offered candy while they completed an unrelated survey.

RESULTS

Parents with greater guilt reported stronger intentions to improve both feeding (b = .27, p = .010) and eating (b = .21, p = .019) in the future. However, among parents with higher (but not lower) BMI, those who reported greater guilt served more unhealthy foods for their child in the buffet (b = .32, p = .010) and were more likely to eat candy at the end of the study (b = .92, p = .004). Further analyses revealed that guilt only predicted greater feeding intentions when parents had served relatively more unhealthy foods in the buffet (b = .43, p < .001).

CONCLUSIONS

Findings echo the mixed conceptualization of guilt shown in previous literature on health behavior. More research is necessary to understand the long-term influence of guilt on eating and feeding behavior and the circumstances under which guilt is associated with detrimental versus healthy behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Path Tortuosity in Virtual Reality: A Novel Approach for Quantifying Behavioral Process in a Food Choice Context

There is a pressing need to better understand how parents make feeding decisions for their children, but extant measures focus primarily on outcomes rather than examining the process of food choice as it unfolds. This exploratory study examined parents' translational movement as they moved throughout a virtual reality-based buffet restaurant to select a lunch for their child. Our aim was to explore whether translational movement would be related to cognitive and affective variables that underlie motivation, effort, and ultimate choices within food decision-making contexts (e.g., guilt, self-efficacy). Movement data were quantified in terms of path tortuosity: the degree of straightness of one's path while traveling through a space. Greater path tortuosity predicted a reduction in parents' guilt about their child feeding, above and beyond actual food chosen. Results suggest path tortuosity serves as an implicit measure of effort put forth by parents throughout the food decision-making process. Future work should continue to explore the utility of novel metrics that can be obtained from unique data sources, such as location tracking, for elucidating complicated behavioral processes such as food choice.

Validity of assessing child feeding with virtual reality

Assessment of parents' child feeding behavior is challenging, and there is need for additional methodological approaches. Virtual reality technology allows for the creation of behavioral measures, and its implementation overcomes several limitations of existing methods. This report evaluates the validity and usability of the Virtual Reality (VR) Buffet among a sample of 52 parents of children aged 3-7. Participants served a meal of pasta and apple juice in both a virtual setting and real-world setting (counterbalanced and separated by a distractor task). They then created another meal for their child, this time choosing from the full set of food options in the VR Buffet. Finally, participants completed a food estimation task followed by a questionnaire, which assessed their perceptions of the VR Buffet. Results revealed that the amount of virtual pasta served by parents correlated significantly with the amount of real pasta they served, rs = 0.613, p < .0001, as did served amounts of virtual and real apple juice, rs = 0.822, p < .0001. Furthermore, parents' perception of the calorie content of chosen foods was significantly correlated with observed calorie content (rs = 0.438, p = .002), and parents agreed that they would feed the meal they created to their child (M = 4.43, SD = 0.82 on a 1-5 scale). The data presented here demonstrate that parent behavior in the VR Buffet is highly related to real-world behavior, and that the tool is well-rated by parents. Given the data presented and the potential benefits of the abundant behavioral data the VR Buffet can provide, we conclude that it is a valid and needed addition to the array of tools for assessing feeding behavior.