Child-Feeding Practices among Mothers (Version 5.0)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A comparison of child-feeding practices among mothers attending a weight management service and mothers in the community.
IRAS ID
227875
Contact name
Chloe Patel
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Warwick
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
SC.76/16-17, Sponsorship reference number
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 28 days
Research summary
Parents are highly influential on their child’s eating behaviours as eating behaviours developed in childhood can continue into adulthood. Parents, unknowingly, may promote weight gain in their children through the use of inappropriate child-feeding behaviours. Examples of child-feeding behaviours include modelling eating behaviours, monitoring food intake, food restriction, pressuring children to eat, encouragement to eat, use of food as a reward and use of food to control children’s emotional state.
In order to understand childhood overweight and obesity and child-eating behaviours, a first step is to explore and identify and explore the child-feeding practices being used by mothers. Mothers are the focus in the current study as research indicates they take primary responsibility for feeding their children and spend more time with their child/ren during mealtimes than fathers.
This study aims to identify and explore the child-feeding behaviours used by clinically obese mothers being seen in a Bariatric Surgery Service and mothers in the community. There is a need to focus on parents with clinical obesity (obesity causing medical complications) since this subset of parents may be at high risk of familial transmission of eating behaviours to their child/ren.
Data will be collected via eight questionnaires that have been used previously with mothers. The questionnaires ask mothers about themselves, their relationship with food and their child/ren. Mothers in the clinical setting will complete the questionnaire pack three times (at their first appointment and 6-months and 12-months follow up). This is to explore whether child-feeding behaviours change over the course of treatment in the Bariatric Surgery Service. Mothers in the community setting will complete the questionnaire pack once.
Identifying the child-feeding behaviours used by obese mothers may inform the development of helpful initiatives for parents to promote healthy eating behaviours in their children that prevent unhealthy weights and eating problems.REC name
West Midlands - Black Country Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/WM/0360
Date of REC Opinion
5 Oct 2017
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion