title: A Longitudinal Investigation of Bidirectional Associations between Children's Disinhibited Eating Behaviour and Parenting
Creators: name: Joyce, Jessica L.
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2009
Subjects: subject: disinhibited eating behaviour
subject: childhood obesity
subject: child psychology
subject: Parent Feeding Dimensions Questionnaire
subject: parent-child interactions
subject: eating behaviour
subject: parenting

description: Child overweight and obesity are significant public health concerns. Most would agree that the problem must be addressed by implementing interventions at multiple levels from the broader macrosystem down to the individual. These interventions depend on basic knowledge of the correlates and causes of eating and weight problems at each level. When focused on young children, the family is one significant source of influence, but only a few studies have focused on how parenting is associated with young children’s eating and weight problems, and how children also may play a role in these processes. The current research was focused on identifying some of the processes involved in the associations between parenting and young children’s (age 4 to 8) eating and weight problems. Three studies were conducted. In particular, a new measure of parent interactions with children in the eating/feeding domain was developed, and the parent feeding behaviour of restriction also was investigated. In addition, constructs examined as correlates, mediators or moderators of parenting and children’s eating and weight included child temperamental characteristics and gender, parent’s own eating behaviour and concern about their weight, and parents’ perception and concern about their children’s weight. Four main sets of findings emerged from the studies. First, a new measure of six food-related parenting dimensions, the Parent Feeding Dimensions Questionnaire (PFDQ), was developed and validated through a series of two studies (N = 84 and N = 230). This measure was based on a six-dimensional model of parenting grounded in Self-Determination Theory (Skinner, Johnson, &amp; Snyder, 2005). The final 32-item version of the PFDQ was found to be a reliable and valid tool for measuring a wider range of food-related parenting dimensions than is currently available. Second, how and under what conditions parenting may influence children’s eating and weight was examined in a study of 230 parents and their children. In this study, parents completed questionnaires, whereas children were weighed at school. It was found that children’s disinhibited eating partially mediated the association between parent restriction and children’s BMI and that associations between restriction and children’s disinhibited eating differed depending on parents’ supportive, coercive and chaotic food-related parenting. Third, drawing from data collected from the same 230 parents, parent and child characteristics were investigated as correlates, mediators and moderators of associations between parenting and children’s disinhibited eating and weight. It was found that parent perceptions and, to a lesser extent, eating behaviour may be important factors in determining parenting in the eating and feeding contexts. Further, preliminary support was found for the hypothesis that such parenting is associated with child characteristics, particularly child temperament, and that gathering information on temperament and parenting may provide a better account of children’s eating problems and overweight. Fourth and finally, a longitudinal bidirectional model of parenting and children’s disinhibited eating was tested with two waves of longitudinal data collected from 163 parents. The findings showed that earlier parenting restriction was associated with a relatively greater increase in children’s disinhibited eating over time (across a 17-month period) but not vice versa. Hence, parents had a significant influence on their children’s eating behaviours over time, but no child effect on parents was found. The findings presented here suggest that investigations of the family environment and parents in relation to the development of weight problems in children would benefit from the continued examination of specific, proximal parent behaviours that are targeted toward the child (such as parent restriction), but should also consider more distal, contextual factors related to parenting and the family such as the quality of the socioemotional climate of parent-child interactions in the feeding domain (e.g., parenting dimensions). Future designs need to test multifactorial models of mutual, concurrent, and temporal influences between children and parents, with consideration of how (i.e., the mechanisms) or under what conditions associations or effects occur. The findings of this research are discussed in the context of key issues related to food-related parenting and children disinhibited eating research and in relation to implications for intervention, prevention and public policy.