Parental Feeding Styles and Their Association With Complementary Feeding Practices and Growth in Mexican Children

Background: Complementary feeding practices and corresponding parental feeding styles influence nutritional status in later stages of childhood. Findings on the association of these variables with infant growth remain inconsistent; in Mexico, a research gap exists in this area.Research Aims: (1) To characterize parental feeding styles and complementary feeding practices, and (2) to evaluate the association of parental feeding styles with complementary feeding practices and infant growth at 6 and 9 months of age.Methods: Data were collected from a prospective Mexican birth cohort. Parental feeding styles, complementary feeding practices, and anthropometric data from 263 to 234 mother-child pairs (infants of 6 and 9 months of age, respectively) were analyzed. Logistic and linear regression models were used to determine the associations between variables.Results: The predominant parental feeding style was the “responsive style” (90%). Only 43.7 and 8.1% of 6- and 9-month-old infants, had adequate complementary feeding practices, respectively. At 6 months, mothers who were responsive to satiety signals had 11% lesser possibilities (OR = 0.89, 95% CI [0.80, 0.98]) of their infant having inadequate complementary feeding practices than their counterparts and “pressuring to finish” and “pressuring to eat cereal” sub-constructs were associated with lower weight for length and body mass index Z-scores (p = 0.02).Conclusions: A high proportion of infants (>40%) did not meet international recommendations. The “pressuring” parental feeding style sub-constructs were associated with growth indicators in 6-month old infants. This emphasizes the importance of promoting parental responsiveness to infant appetite and satiety signals to achieving adequate complementary feeding practices.

Tricking Parents: A Review of Mechanisms and Signals of Host Manipulation by Brood-Parasitic Young

Obligate avian brood parasites depend entirely on heterospecific hosts for rearing their offspring. From hatching until independence, the young parasites must deal with the challenge of obtaining sufficient parental care from foster parents that are attuned to provisioning their own offspring. Parent-offspring communication is mediated by complex begging displays in which nestlings and fledglings exhibit visual (e.g., gaping and postures) and vocal (e.g., begging calls) traits that serve as signals to parents to adjust and allocate parental effort. Parasites can manipulate host parental behavior by exploiting these stable parent-offspring communication systems in their favor. During the past 30 years, the study of host exploitation by parasitic chicks has yielded important insights into the function and evolution of manipulative signals in brood parasites. However, despite these major advances, there are still important gaps in our knowledge about how parasitic nestling and fledglings tune into the host’s communication channels and the adaptive value of the visual and acoustic signals they exhibit. Here we review the literature pertaining to host manipulation by parasitic young, focusing on four non-mutually exclusive mechanisms (i.e., host chick mimicry, begging exaggeration, host-attuned begging calls, and sensory exploitation) and the function and evolution of the signals involved, with the aim to summarize and discuss putative adaptations for stimulating parental feeding and escaping host discrimination. Finally, we bring some concluding remarks and suggest directions for future research on the ways in which brood parasites adapt to the communication systems of other birds to exploit the necessary parental care.

SmartFeeding4Kids, an online self-guided parenting intervention to promote positive feeding practices and healthy diet in young children: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Background Caregivers’ influence on young children’s eating behaviors is widely recognized. Nutritional interventions that focus on the promotion of children’s healthy diet should actively involve parents, focusing on their feeding behaviors and practices. Methods This work aims to describe the development and study protocol of the SmartFeeding4Kids (SF4K) program, an online self-guided 7-session intervention for parents of young (2–6 years old) children. The program is informed by social cognitive, self-regulation, and habit formation theoretical models and uses self-regulatory techniques as self-monitoring, goal setting, and feedback to promote behavior change. We propose to examine the intervention efficacy on children’s intake of fruit, vegetables, and added sugars, and parental feeding practices with a two-arm randomized controlled with four times repeated measures design (baseline, immediately, 3 and 6 months after intervention). Parental perceived barriers about food and feeding, food parenting self-efficacy, and motivation to change will be analyzed as secondary outcomes. The study of the predictors of parents’ dropout rates and the trajectories of parents’ and children’s outcomes are also objectives of this work. Discussion The SmartFeeding4Kids program relies on technological resources to deliver parents’ self-regulation techniques that proved effective in promoting health behaviors. The study design can enhance the knowledge about the most effective methodologies to change parental feeding practices and children’s food intake. As a self-guided online program, SmartFeeding4Kids might overcome parents’ attrition more effectively, besides being easy to disseminate and cost-effective. Trial registration The study was registered in ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT04591496) on October 19, 2020.

The early maternal environment shapes the parental response to offspring UV ornamentation

Parents allocate resources to offspring to increase their survival and to maximize their own fitness, while this investment implies costs to their condition and future reproduction. Parents are hence expected to optimally allocate their resources. They should invest equally in all their offspring under good conditions, but when parental capacity is limited, parents should invest in the offspring with the highest probability of survival. Such parental favouritism is facilitated by the fact that offspring have evolved condition-dependent traits to signal their quality to parents. In this study we explore whether the parental response to an offspring quality signal depends on the intrinsic capacity of the parents, here the female. We first manipulated the intrinsic capacity of blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) females through lutein-supplementation during egg laying, and we subsequently blocked the UV/yellow reflectance of breast feathers on half of the nestlings in each brood. We did not find evidence that the female intrinsic capacity shaped parental feeding or sibling competition according to offspring UV/yellow colouration. However, nestling UV/yellow colour affected costly behavioural interactions in the form of prey-testings (when a parent places a prey item into a nestling’s gape but removes it again). In lutein-supplemented nests, fathers but not mothers favoured UV-blocked chicks by testing them less often, supporting previous results. Accordingly, in lutein-supplemented nests, UV-blocked nestlings gained more mass than their siblings, while in control nests we found the opposite effect and UV-blocked nestlings gained less. Our results emphasize that the prenatal environment shaped the role of offspring UV/yellow colour during certain family interactions and are indicative for sex-specific parental care strategies.

Efeito de Intervenções Focadas nas Práticas Alimentares Parentais Sobre o Comportamento Alimentar e o Status de Peso de Pré-Escolares

Os pais desempenham papel fundamental na instalação e manutenção dos hábitos alimentares das crianças, sendo responsáveis desde a compra até a oferta dos alimentos, contexto dentro do qual estão inseridas as práticas alimentares parentais. Utilizadas com maior frequência em crianças pré-escolares, estratégias como a pressão para comer e alimentos como recompensa podem contribuir para o desenvolvimento de sobrepeso e obesidade infantil. Diante disso, têm sido desenvolvidos diferentes programas de intervenção para modificar tal situação. Nesse sentido, o presente estudo teve como objetivo avaliar o efeito de intervenções focadas nas práticas alimentares parentais sobre o comportamento alimentar e o status de peso de pré-escolares. Foi realizada uma busca, entre março e maio de 2020, nas bases de dados Scielo, PubMed e Lilacs, utilizando o termo “parental feeding practices”. O total de artigos encontrados foi filtrado por ano de publicação (2016-2020), tipo de estudo, forma de acesso gratuita e faixa etária do público estudado, e posteriormente foram lidos os títulos, resumos e o texto completo dos estudos para finalizar a seleção. Ainda foram adicionados estudos de outras bases de dados, cujos anos foram anteriores ao intervalo considerado na pesquisa. A maioria das publicações encontradas mostraram redução no uso de práticas alimentares parentais inadequadas; redução no consumo de alimentos não saudáveis e aumento da ingestão de alimentos saudáveis no grupo intervenção; mas não mostraram mudanças significativas no IMC/Idade em qualquer grupo, nem diferenças significativas entre os grupos para os parâmetros referidos após as intervenções. As intervenções focadas nas práticas alimentares parentais podem reduzir o uso de estratégias inadequadas pelos pais e melhorar o comportamento alimentar de crianças pré-escolares, mas não foram capazes de provocar mudanças significativas no status de peso deste público, o que mostra a necessidade de realização de mais estudos para observar efeitos neste parâmetro a longo prazo.

Parent Gender Affects the Influence of Parent Emotional Eating and Feeding Practices on Child Emotional Eating

Extant research supports a direct association between parent’s own emotional eating and their child’s emotional eating, and demonstrates correlations among parent emotional eating, feeding practices, and child emotional eating. However, the majority of this work focuses on the separate influences of these factors. The current study aims to add to the literature by simultaneously examining the indirect effects of three major parental feeding practices (i.e., emotion regulation, instrumental, and restrictive feeding) in the association between parent emotional eating and child emotional eating, and exploring how these indirect effects vary based on parent gender. Parents (86 fathers, 324 mothers) of an elementary school-age child (M = 8.35, SD = 2.29, range = 5–13) completed an online survey through Qualtrics Panels. Results suggested that restrictive feeding partially accounted for the association between parent and child emotional eating in the combined sample of mothers and fathers. Exploratory analyses revealed that the indirect effects of parental feeding practices in the association between parent emotional eating and child emotional eating varied based on parent gender. Among mothers, restrictive feeding was the only feeding practice that partially accounted for the association between maternal and child emotional eating, whereas all three feeding practices fully accounted for the association between father and child emotional eating. As the bulk of the literature on parent emotional eating and feeding has solely focused on mothers, these findings offer insight into how feeding practices may differentially function in the relation between parent emotional eating and child emotional eating for mothers versus fathers.