Early Feeding Practices and Development of Childhood Obesity

Abstract

Early child feeding practices, defined as the ways in which caregivers interact with their children around food and eating, have been implicated in children’s risk of obesity. Early child feeding practices can be conceptualized as beginning with the choices parents make about breastfeeding in early infancy and extending to choices about how mealtimes are structured and which foods are made available in the home environment. Parent feeding practices across these contexts and developmental periods have also been conceptualized as differing with respect to pressure, monitoring, and restriction, as well as with regard to sensitivity to the child’s hunger and satiety cues. Emerging work has increased the understanding of individual differences in appetitive traits, such as a child’s propensity to eat in the absence of hunger, eat in response to stress or emotion, or eat in response to food cues in the environment. These child behavioral predispositions likely require individualized parenting approaches. In this chapter, we review current best evidence regarding the associations between child feeding practices and obesity, starting from infancy through early childhood. Overall, evidence for a causal role of different parenting approaches in conferring child obesity risk is modest at best.