The impact of maternal negative affectivity on dietary patterns of 18‐month‐old children in the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study

Abstract

Early dietary habits are formative for dietary habits later in life. Maternal personality might be an important factor in unhealthy feeding of children. The current study aims to assess the degree to which the personality trait of negative affectivity in mothers predicts their child's diet at age 18 months. This study is a part of the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study conducted at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. A total of 27 763 mothers completed 3 repeated assessments of negative affectivity before and after childbirth and of the child's diet when the child was 18 months old. Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify the dietary patterns, and structural equation modeling was used to investigate the relationship with negative affectivity adjusted for socio-demographical variables. Exploratory factor analysis of a foods frequency questionnaire revealed two dietary patterns in the child, labeled unhealthy diet and wholesome diet. The unhealthy diet comprised foods rich in sugar and fat; the wholesome diet comprised foods rich in fibre, vitamins and minerals. Mothers high in negative affectivity were more inclined to feed their child an unhealthy diet. The results were adjusted for maternal age, years of education, relative income, marital status, number of children, having the child in daycare, maternal smoking, maternal body mass index, and child gender. This study shows that a maternal personality trait, negative affectivity, is related to feeding the child an unhealthy diet after controlling for key socio-demographic variables.

Associations Between Temperament at Age 1.5 Years and Obesogenic Diet at Ages 3 and 7 Years

“…This is in keeping with an earlier study on 18-month-olds showing that mothers’ negative affectivity was associated with an “unhealthy dietary factor” but not with a “wholesome” dietary factor. 13 Yet, this finding does not disprove the influence of maternal temperament on child diet in general. It is possible that other maternal traits, such as control or conscientiousness, would have been associated with the obesogenic diet examined here.…”

Short Tools to Assess Young Children's Dietary Intake: A Systematic Review Focusing on Application to Dietary Index Research

“…The final 16 papers reported on 15 tools developed to assess dietary intake in early childhood (birth-5 years); seven evaluate infant and toddler dietary intake [16–22] eight evaluate preschoolers dietary intake [23–31] (Table 1). Studies included a range of population groups from predominately European [16, 17, 19–21, 24–28] and other western countries [18, 23, 29–31] and were largely published from 2006 onwards [16, 18, 19, 23–31], with no retrieved papers published prior to 2000. The number of participants varied from 44 [25] to 27 763 [17], with three studies presenting data from large, prospective birth cohorts UK Southampton Women's Study (SWS) [19], UK Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) [16], and the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) [17].…”

Impact of maternal negative affectivity on light alcohol use and binge drinking during pregnancy

“…It is well-established that symptom measures of anxiety and depression are interchangeable with trait measures of negative affectivity, with correlations typically around or above 0.70 (19). We used the aggregated measures of the SCL-5 and SCL-8 as proxies for negative affectivity in previous studies (20) and found the internal consistency of the aggregated scale to be high with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.87.…”

“…Women in the abstaining category served as controls. The three categories of alcohol use were computed for the three months before pregnancy, the first trimester (gestational weeks 0-12) and second trimester (gestational weeks [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. We choose to analyse the first and second trimester separately because some of the women drinking in the first trimester may have been unaware of the pregnancy and hence were not typical of those drinking in spite of their pregnancy.…”