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Caregivers’ Perceived Emotional and Feeding Responsiveness Toward Preschool Children: Associations and Paths of Influence

Thu, April 8, 11:45am to 12:45pm EDT (11:45am to 12:45pm EDT), Virtual

Abstract

There is a substantial amount of empirical evidence connecting emotion regulation to eating behaviors (Power et al., 2016; Evers et al., 2010; Macht, 2008; Ganley, 1989). However, little is known about the role of emotional responsiveness in the context of feeding. The ways in which caregivers respond to children’s emotions are influential in shaping children’s ability to self-regulate emotions (Eisenberg et al., 1996; Frankel et al., 2012). Similarly, caregivers affect children’s self-regulation of energy intake through their feeding practices (Birch & Fisher, 1998; Johnson & Birch, 1994) and more recent studies indicate that caregivers may also influence children’s energy intake through the ways in which they respond to children’s emotions surrounding food (Frankel et al., 2012; Bost et al., 2014). This way, it is suggested that parental influences on children’s self-regulation of emotions and on children’s self-regulation of energy intake are intertwined (Saltzman et al., 2016).
Our main goal is to analyze the influence of emotional responsiveness on feeding responsiveness. Specifically, we’ll explore whether emotion regulation strategies used by parents predict important food-related practices.
Parents of 159 children (78 girls and 81 boys) between 2 and 6 year (M = 46.73; DP = 13.38) reported on their reactivity to children’s negative affect using the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES; Fabes et al., 1990) and on their feeding practices using the Comprehensive Feeding Practices Questionnaire (CFPQ; Musher-Eizenman, & Holub, 2007). For both CCNES and CFPQ, composite scores were generated reflecting total positive/negative emotion regulation responses and emotion-related, pressuring / healthy feeding styles, respectively (Bost et al., 2014).
Bivariate correlations revealed that CCNES subscales reflecting parents’ negative responses to children’s negative emotions tend to be positive associated with feeding practices marked by emotion regulation, reward, pressure and restriction. In turn (and contrary to negative subscales) CNNES subscales reflecting positive emotion responses tend to be positively associated with feeding practices based on encouraging, monitoring, modeling and teaching (table 1). Additionally, regression analyses results suggested that total negative emotion regulation predict lower frequency of use of healthy feeding styles (contrary to total positive emotion regulation) and a higher frequency of use of emotion-related and pressure feeding styles (table 2).
In sum, our data suggest that when parents reported to respond more negatively to their children’s distress (as opposed to when they respond more positively) they also tend to report a higher use of less effective or negative feeding practices. Results also showed that caregiver positive emotion regulation responses to child’s distress predict healthy feeding styles, contrary to caregiver negative emotion regulation responses to child’s distress, which also predict emotion-related, pressuring feeding styles that have been pointed as predictors of child obesity (Bost et al., 2014). These findings are important because they suggest that differences in parent emotion responses may set the stage for parents’ use of negative feeding practices, which in turn may contribute to the development of unhealthy eating behaviors, putting children at risk of becoming overweight or obese (Larsen et al., 2015; Bost et al., 2014; Peters et al., 2012).

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