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The Child Feeding Guide: A digital health intervention for reducing controlling child feeding practices and maternal anxiety over time
journal contribution
posted on 2020-05-15, 08:25 authored by Emma HaycraftEmma Haycraft, Gemma WitcombGemma Witcomb, Claire FarrowFussy eating and food refusal are common in young children. These behaviours can contribute to anxiety or concern in parents and caregivers, who have called for credible support to help them navigate the challenges of feeding young children. Given recent increases in technology, and use of the internet as a trusted source of parenting support, the Child Feeding Guide digital health intervention was created to provide evidence-based support to parents and caregivers to help them to feed children and establish healthy eating habits from the early years. An evaluation was conducted with 25 mothers (with a child aged 6 months – 4 years) who used the Child Feeding Guide website/app over four weeks. Mothers provided information about their feeding practices and anxiety levels at baseline, and again four weeks later, and answered questions regarding the acceptability and use of the digital support resource. Significant decreases were seen in maternal anxiety and in maternal use of pressure to eat and restriction of food from children for weight reasons. Mothers reported that the Child Feeding Guide was easy to use, that they valued its credibility and reassurances, and that its content helped them to better understand their child’s eating behaviour. These promising findings suggest that naturalistic use of a digital health intervention could contribute to reductions in mothers’ use of controlling feeding practices and levels of anxiety. Such findings are important for supporting the development of healthy eating habits in young children and are likely to be relevant to health and childcare professionals.
Funding
The Child Feeding Guide was developed with generous support from the Higher Education Innovation Funding (via Loughborough University) and the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences at Loughborough University.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Nutrition BulletinVolume
45Issue
4Pages
474 - 482Publisher
John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Nutrition FoundationVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorsPublisher statement
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Acceptance date
2020-05-14Publication date
2020-06-08Copyright date
2020ISSN
1471-9827eISSN
1467-3010Publisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Dr Emma Haycraft. Deposit date: 14 May 2020Usage metrics
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