Poster #106 - The Relations between Food Insecurity, Maternal Emotional Eating and Toddler Feeding

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Health, Growth, Injury

Integrative Statement

Background: Children benefit from a responsive feeding environment where their internal signals of hunger and satiety are recognized and met with prompt, emotionally supportive, contingent, and developmentally appropriate responses (Black, 2011). Responsive feeding helps children learn that their signals will be met with consistent responses, important for the development of healthy eating habits. Stressors such as food insecurity may inhibit a parent’s ability to engage in responsive feeding practices by promoting the use of maladaptive coping behaviors, including emotional eating. Caregivers who themselves struggle with their own emotional eating may be less likely to provide a responsive feeding environment for their child.

Although linked at the level of individuals, it may be an ecological fallacy to infer that food insecurity is associated with eating or feeding on any specific occasion. This leads to the question: are the effects of food insecurity are better conceptualized as transient state factors (occasion-dependent) or does food insecurity represents a more global and persistent risk? The fluctuating nature of food insecurity highlights the need for longitudinal research in order understand these relations over time.

Methods: The current study utilized data from 277 mothers of toddlers (age 12-32 months) participating in an obesity prevention trial. Mothers were assessed three times over 12 months (baseline and two follow-ups). Food insecurity was measured using the 6-item Household Food Security screener (Blumberg et al., 2011), emotional eating was assessed using the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26; Garner et al., 1982). Responsive feeding was measured using the Toddler Feeding Questionnaire (Hurley et al., 2013). Within- and between-person components of emotional eating and responsive feeding were decomposed using person-mean centering. A multilevel mediation model was run using Monte Carlo simulation to assess the indirect effects at within- and between-person levels.

Results: At baseline, 28.6% of the sample reported being food insecure. The between-person indirect effect was significant; on average, higher probability of food insecurity was associated with greater emotional eating, which in turn predicted lower responsive feeding. In contrast, the within-person indirect effect for emotional eating was non-significant. On occasions where mothers reported food insecurity they did not report significantly more emotional eating and or less responsive feeding.

Conclusions: Emotional eating mediated the relation between food insecurity and responsive feeding on average, but not within individuals. Higher overall probability of food insecurity across 12 months was related to lower responsive feeding through increased maternal emotional eating. This was not the case for specific occasions. On occasions where mothers were food insecure, they did not engage in significantly more emotional eating, or fewer responsive feeding behaviors. Ultimately, food insecurity may function as a person-level risk factor, rather than a transient state-dependent risk. Higher average levels of emotional eating (as opposed to relative increases in emotional eating) may be a mechanism by which food insecurity influences parenting behaviors, and ultimately child health. Results point to the importance of reducing overall food insecurity and assessing maternal emotional eating.

Authors

• Bridget Armstrong, University of Maryland School of Medicine
  Presenting Author

• Maureen M. Black, RTI International & University of Maryland School of Medicine
  Non-Presenting Author