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Fussy eating in toddlers: A content analysis of parents' online support seeking

The development of healthy eating habits in childhood is essential to reducing later risk of obesity. However, many parents manage fussy eating in toddlerhood with ineffective feeding practices that limit children's dietary variety and reinforce obesogenic eating behaviours. Understanding paren...

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Autores principales: Fraser, Kylie, Markides, Brittany Reese, Barrett, Norma, Laws, Rachel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8189205/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33739624
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/mcn.13171
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author Fraser, Kylie
Markides, Brittany Reese
Barrett, Norma
Laws, Rachel
author_facet Fraser, Kylie
Markides, Brittany Reese
Barrett, Norma
Laws, Rachel
author_sort Fraser, Kylie
collection PubMed
description The development of healthy eating habits in childhood is essential to reducing later risk of obesity. However, many parents manage fussy eating in toddlerhood with ineffective feeding practices that limit children's dietary variety and reinforce obesogenic eating behaviours. Understanding parents' feeding concerns and support needs may assist in the development of feeding interventions designed to support parents' uptake of responsive feeding practices. A total of 130 original posts by parents of toddlers (12–36 months) were extracted from the online website Reddit's ‘r/Toddlers’ community discussion forum over a 12‐month period. Qualitative content analysis was used to categorise the fussy eating topics that parents were most concerned about and the types of support they were seeking from online peers. The most frequently raised fussy eating concerns were refusal to eat foods offered, inadequate intake (quantity and quality), problematic mealtime behaviours and changes in eating patterns. Parents were primarily seeking practical support (69.2%) to manage emergent fussy eating behaviours. This consisted of requests for practical feeding advice and strategies or meal ideas. Nearly half of parents sought emotional support (47.7%) to normalise their child's eating behaviour and seek reassurance from people with lived experience. Informational support about feeding was sought to a lesser extent (16.2%). Fussy eating poses a barrier to children's dietary variety and establishing healthy eating habits. These results suggest parents require greater knowledge and skills on ‘how to feed’ children and support to manage feeding expectations. Health professionals and child feeding interventions should focus on providing parents with practical feeding strategies to manage fussy eating. Supporting parents to adopt and maintain responsive feeding practices is vital to developing healthy eating habits during toddlerhood that will continue throughout adulthood.
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spelling pubmed-81892052021-06-16 Fussy eating in toddlers: A content analysis of parents' online support seeking Fraser, Kylie Markides, Brittany Reese Barrett, Norma Laws, Rachel Matern Child Nutr Original Articles The development of healthy eating habits in childhood is essential to reducing later risk of obesity. However, many parents manage fussy eating in toddlerhood with ineffective feeding practices that limit children's dietary variety and reinforce obesogenic eating behaviours. Understanding parents' feeding concerns and support needs may assist in the development of feeding interventions designed to support parents' uptake of responsive feeding practices. A total of 130 original posts by parents of toddlers (12–36 months) were extracted from the online website Reddit's ‘r/Toddlers’ community discussion forum over a 12‐month period. Qualitative content analysis was used to categorise the fussy eating topics that parents were most concerned about and the types of support they were seeking from online peers. The most frequently raised fussy eating concerns were refusal to eat foods offered, inadequate intake (quantity and quality), problematic mealtime behaviours and changes in eating patterns. Parents were primarily seeking practical support (69.2%) to manage emergent fussy eating behaviours. This consisted of requests for practical feeding advice and strategies or meal ideas. Nearly half of parents sought emotional support (47.7%) to normalise their child's eating behaviour and seek reassurance from people with lived experience. Informational support about feeding was sought to a lesser extent (16.2%). Fussy eating poses a barrier to children's dietary variety and establishing healthy eating habits. These results suggest parents require greater knowledge and skills on ‘how to feed’ children and support to manage feeding expectations. Health professionals and child feeding interventions should focus on providing parents with practical feeding strategies to manage fussy eating. Supporting parents to adopt and maintain responsive feeding practices is vital to developing healthy eating habits during toddlerhood that will continue throughout adulthood. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2021-03-19 /pmc/articles/PMC8189205/ /pubmed/33739624 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/mcn.13171 Text en © 2021 The Authors. Maternal & Child Nutrition published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Original Articles
Fraser, Kylie
Markides, Brittany Reese
Barrett, Norma
Laws, Rachel
Fussy eating in toddlers: A content analysis of parents' online support seeking
title Fussy eating in toddlers: A content analysis of parents' online support seeking
title_full Fussy eating in toddlers: A content analysis of parents' online support seeking
title_fullStr Fussy eating in toddlers: A content analysis of parents' online support seeking
title_full_unstemmed Fussy eating in toddlers: A content analysis of parents' online support seeking
title_short Fussy eating in toddlers: A content analysis of parents' online support seeking
title_sort fussy eating in toddlers: a content analysis of parents' online support seeking
topic Original Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8189205/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33739624
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/mcn.13171
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