Assessing Responsive Feeding in Infant Classrooms During the Transition to Solids

• In Event: The Impact of Healthful Nutrition Practices in Early Childhood Classrooms on Child Learning and Development

Abstract

Objectives
In addition to the type and amount of food children eat within ECE settings, how children eat is an equally important component of a healthful mealtime environment. Responsive feeding (RF) is defined as creating a supportive nutrition environment whereby caregivers provide healthful food in developmentally appropriate ways and attend to children’s cues of hunger and satiety, and children are given the autonomy to decide how much and whether to eat (Satter, 1986). To date no instrument has been developed that captures responsive feeding practices in Early Care and Education (ECE) settings. Although research examining feeding practices of teachers in ECE settings has relied on modifying self-report tools that assess parental feeding practices, such an approach fails to account for the unique parameters of ECE settings, resulting in findings that are inconsistent and difficult to compare and interpret. The objective of this presentation is to report on the development of an observational coding scheme that is specific and appropriate for use in ECE settings to assess RF practices of teachers during the developmental period marked by infants’ transition to complementary foods. Early childhood teachers’ opportunity to feed responsively during this time represents a key opportunity to foster, rather than interfere, with infants’ own internal hunger and satiety cues and emerging feeding autonomy (Perez-Escamilla et al., 2017).

Data Source/Methods
To develop a responsive feeding coding scheme, an iterative observational design was employed. Over a five-month period, independent and group observations of infant mealtimes across three infant classrooms were completed. These observations were used to identify and define teacher feeding behaviors by mapping observations onto existing domains of parental RF as outlined in the Food Parenting Practices Content Map (Vaughn et al., 2016; see Figure 1). The RF behaviors most commonly observed provided a coding scheme pilot. To refine the coding scheme, the coding scheme pilot was independently applied to two video-recorded infant mealtimes and discussed by the research team. Utilizing both inductive and deductive approaches to develop the coding scheme, 5 domains from the Food Parenting Practices Content Map that appeared most prevalent within the ECE setting were identified. Preliminary results indicate the RF domains of ‘Restriction’, ‘Pressure to Eat’, ‘Encouragement’ and ‘Praise’ represent teacher behaviors that are frequently observed within ECE infant classrooms. Additionally, a global rating measure was developed to characterize the mealtime climate of each observation.

Significance
As the field of obesity prevention in ECE settings evolves, reliable and valid tools to assess responsive feeding practices of ECE teachers will be vital to improving the health and nutrition environments of ECE settings. The full paper will report on ongoing data being collected from 30 ECE teachers. Findings from this larger sample will provide insight on the potential for the use of ECE-specific observational measures to assess teachers’ use of responsive feeding. Development of such a measure will enable the evaluation of teachers’ feeding practices at local, state, and national levels, and provide valuable insight into the effects of policy-based nutrition guidelines on the feeding practices of teachers.

Authors

• Alexandra Lundquist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Brent A. McBride, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign