Do Parents Feed Their Children Unhealthier Food When Stressed?: Daily Feeding Practices Amid COVID-19

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Health, Growth, Injury

Abstract

As of 2016, nearly 19% of all children ages 2-19 were overweight or obese (Hales et al., 2017). During early childhood, when rates of obesity are lowest, children are learning what foods to eat and how to eat, but parents decide what foods to offer their children. The context in which families are embedded can influence parents’ feeding practices and their child’s risk for obesity (Gundersen et al., 2008). Parents’ stress has been linked to greater fast food consumption (Parks et al., 2012) and lower diet quality among their children (O’Connor et al., 2019). Yet the majority of work on parents’ stress and their food offerings have not examined daily changes in stress, which is key for understanding for how parents’ daily experiences affects child health (Sher, 2004). However, the addition of a new stressor, the COVID-19 pandemic, may worsen parents’ experience of stress (Brown et al., 2020), which in turn may affect their feeding practices. In this study, we examine whether daily fluctuation in parents’ stress, including COVID-19 stress, is related to daily variation in their food offerings, and to examine whether the relationship between parents’ daily stress and their feeding practices is moderated by child characteristics (see Figure 1 for conceptual model).

The data will be derived from a baseline survey and 10 days of diaries with parents of 2 to-4-year-old children; 61 parents (Mage = 34.75 [SD = 5.91], 87% mothers, 84% White, 12% Hispanic) have enrolled in the study as of 9/28/20, but our total sample size will be 100 parents. The baseline survey includes measures of COVID-19 stress (APA, 2020), global perceived stress (Cohen et al., 1983), child weight status (parent-report), trait child difficulty during mealtimes (researcher-generated), and child sex. The diaries include measures of daily stress (including COVID-19 stress; adapted from Bar-Kalifa & Rafaeli, 2013), parents’ food offerings (adapted from O’Connor et al., 2008, and Saloheimo et al., 2015), and daily child fussiness during mealtimes (researcher-generated). Parents’ food offerings will be coded for the following food groups: fruits, vegetables, proteins, grains, dairy, high in fat/sugar, processed, unprocessed, water, and sugary beverages.

Multilevel modeling analyses will be used to investigate the goals of this study. We predict that parents who report more global and COVID-19 stress will report greater daily stress. We also predict that on days when parents experience greater levels of stress (including COVID-19-specific stress), they will offer more unhealthful foods to their children, and that the relation between parents’ stress and their unhealthful food offerings will be stronger for parents whose children are overweight or obese or display more difficult behaviors during mealtimes.

To reduce childhood obesity, interventions that target parents’ feeding behaviors may have the greatest chance of success. However, the current coupling of COVID-19 stress and parents’ existing perceptions of stress may increase the risk of unhealthful food offerings on a daily level. The intent of this study is to guide the development of intervention programming by understanding how parents’ daily experiences, including the impact of COVID-19, affects their feeding behaviors.

Authors

• Jennifer M. Barton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth T. Gershoff, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author