What Do We Do With Our 15 Minutes?

Abstract

Primary care pediatricians give parents advice. Academic pediatricians give primary care pediatricians advice about what advice to give parents. Rarely, though, do we subject our advice to empirical trial. In “An Evaluation of Mother‐centered Anticipatory Guidance to Reduce Obesogenic Infant Feeding Behaviors” in this issue of Pediatrics , French et al1 do just that, and they deserve to be commended for the effort. Reasoning that maternal behaviors play an influential role in children’s eating, French’s team contrasted advice directed at how mothers themselves eat with 2 more traditional approaches: a widely disseminated program of feeding advice called Ounce of Prevention, and a set of messages based on Bright Futures . Each intervention was delivered at a different clinic. Children were enrolled on or before 2 months of age. By 12 months of age, there were small but statistically significant differences in parent-reported feeding behaviors favoring the mother-focused advice. The study is far from perfect. It relied on convenience samples, and, … Address correspondence to Robert Needlman, MD, Department of Pediatrics, MetroHealth Medical Center, 2500 MetroHealth Dr, Cleveland, OH 44109. E-mail: robert.needlman{at}case.edu