Deconstructing food parenting approaches to obesity prevention for the highly food motivated child - High levels of food motivation among young children are heritable, track over time, and associated with elevated risks of unhealthy eating and obesity. Despite significant growth of family-based obesity prevention efforts, the evidence base is remarkably scant on parenting highly food motivated children to prevent obesity and poor dietary outcomes. The need to move away from a “one-size-fits-all” approach to food parenting is particularly important to ensure that the evidence base and the recommendations for obesity prevention efforts that stem from the research generalize to all U.S. families. Our goal is to generate robust basic science evidence on parenting highly food motivated children to prevent excessive dietary intakes and body mass index (BMI) gains during the preschool years. Using a prospective cohort design, we propose to follow 205 caregiver/child dyads at two points over 18 mo as children transition from preschool to elementary school, when significant numbers of children begin to experience problems of poor diet quality and obesity. We will recruit children with varying food motivation to understand whether highly food motivated children have different needs than other children. We propose a multi-method approach using state-of-the-art measures, including ecological momentary assessment, to comprehensively investigate the amount, types, and consistency of food parenting practices (i.e., specific, goal-oriented behaviors) needed to prevent food motivated behaviors, excessive dietary intake, and BMI gains in children. Specifically, we propose to comprehensively evaluate the role of structure (i.e., theoretically supportive) and its differentiation from more coercive types of food parenting control. Aim 1 will characterize multi-dimensional eating behavior profiles and obtain evidence of validity via associations with observed food motivated behaviors, excessive dietary intakes, and BMI gains over 18 mo. Aim 2 will evaluate the amount, type(s), and consistency of food parenting structure needed to prevent food motivated behaviors, excessive dietary intakes, and BMI gains among highly food motivated vs. other children over 18 mo. Aim 3 will evaluate whether structured food parenting practices are more beneficial in the context of global approaches to feeding or feeding styles that involve high levels of control (i.e., authoritarian) vs. more balanced styles (i.e., authoritative). Findings will 1) generate a basic science evidence base on food parenting approaches for highly food motivated children that currently does not exist, 2) provide greater specificity for family-based prevention efforts, and 3) increase the generalizability of research on food parenting in obesity prevention.
