The Child Feeding Guide: A digital health intervention for reducing controlling child feeding practices and maternal anxiety over time

Abstract

Fussy eating and food refusal are common in young children. These behaviours can contribute to anxiety or concern in parents and caregivers, who have called for credible support to help them navigate the challenges of feeding young children. Given recent increases in technology, and use of the Internet as a trusted source of parenting support, the Child Feeding Guide digital health intervention was created to provide evidence‐based support to parents and caregivers to help them to feed children and establish healthy eating habits from the early years. An evaluation was conducted with 25 mothers (with a child aged 6 months to 4 years) who used the Child Feeding Guide website/app over 4 weeks. Mothers provided information about their feeding practices and anxiety levels at baseline, and again 4 weeks later, and answered questions regarding the acceptability and use of the digital support resource. Significant decreases were seen in maternal anxiety and in maternal use of pressure to eat and restriction of food from children for weight reasons. Mothers reported that the Child Feeding Guide was easy to use, that they valued its credibility and reassurances, and that its content helped them to better understand their child’s eating behaviour. These promising findings suggest that naturalistic use of a digital health intervention could contribute to reductions in mothers’ use of controlling feeding practices and levels of anxiety. Such findings are important for supporting the development of healthy eating habits in young children and are likely to be relevant to health and childcare professionals.

Mothers' perceptions of self‐efficacy and satisfaction with parenting are related to their use of controlling and positive food parenting practices

“…This support could come in the form of education programmes that aim to inform parents about typical pitfalls associated with child feeding and that share evidence‐based strategies to promote children's healthy eating. Such an intervention has already been shown to be effective at improving food parenting practices and reducing general feelings of anxiety in mothers of preschool age children (Haycraft et al, 2020 ). Moreover, parenting competence may be a useful outcome when assessing the benefits of interventions seeking to promote healthy eating in the home environment.…”

Fussy eating in toddlers: A content analysis of parents' online support seeking

“…Parents also sought practical support in the form of recipes or meal ideas to overcome their child's fussy eating behaviours. Parents' desire for recipes has been observed in a recent evaluation of a child feeding intervention (Haycraft et al, 2020). Although not a new finding, in this context, it may suggest that parents believe fussy eaters like and accept the same foods and are seeking a quick solution to their feeding concern.…”

Responsive feeding values and practices among families across the Canadian Maritime provinces

“…The Feeding Practices and Structure Questionnaire (FPSQ) has been commonly used to measure maternal responsiveness while feeding toddlers (2 years+) and has recently been adapted for use in infants (Feeding Practices and Structure Questionnaire -Milk Feeding FPSQ-M) (Jansen et al 2021). As well, maternal symptoms of anxiety have been linked to some non-responsive feeding behaviours such as pressure to eat and using food to regulate emotions (Haycraft 2020). Interventions to reduce controlling child feeding practices and maternal anxiety are important to support caregivers in navigating the challenges of feeding young children (Haycraft et al 2020).…”