Assessment of association between parental feeding practice and children eating behavior among preschool children in Addis Abeba.
Creators: name: Wondafrash, Nardos
Publisher: name: National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia
Year: 2019

description: Background: Low and middle-income countries are facing both extremes of public health nutrition problems. Despite the well-established risk factors of mal-nutrition, individual differences in eating behaviors may contribute to the existing variation in nutritional status. Eating behaviors are biological and behavioral processes directed towards meeting bodily requirements; and these behaviors develop during the first years of life. Eating behaviors can be categorized as food approach and food avoidant. Some of the food approach behaviors are enjoyment of food (EF), food responsiveness (FR), emotional overeating (EOE), desire to drink (DD), and food avoidant behaviors are satiety responsiveness (SR), slowness in eating (SE), emotional under eating (EUE) and food fussiness (FF). Parents and caregivers influence their children's eating behavior through communicating their attitudes and beliefs about food and feeding. Objective: To assess the different eating behaviors of preschool children and to determine its association with parental feeding practice in Addis Ababa. Method: A school based cross-sectional study was conducted among preschool children in randomly selected schools. A stratified multi-stage sampling procedure was followed. Eating behavior was measured using a children eating behavior questionnaire and for the parental feeding practice together with parents perception and concern about child weight and perceived feeding responsibility the child feeding questionnaire was used. For parent depression status and child psychological status patient health questionnaire and strength and difficulties questionnaire were used respectively. All the questionnaires were pre-tested interview-based tools that have been translated to the local language and tested for face validity. Internal consistency was estimated using Cronbach's alpha. We used EpiData version 4.4.1.0 for data entry and the statistical software package Stata version 15.0 for data cleaning and analysis. A separate multiple linear regression was run for each scale of children eating behavior and the association with parental feeding practice was explored. Result: Most of mean scores of the children eating behaviors scales. were close to the scale midpoint (2.5). Parental feeding practice monitoring practice had the highest mean score 4.13(SD:1.02) while restriction had the lowest score 3.47(SD:0.91). The internal reliability (Cronbach's alpha) for both questionnaires ranged from 0.50 to 0.89. There was a significant relationship between children eating behavior and parental feeding practice. Parents food restriction practice had positive association with food approach behaviors which are enjoyment of food(b= 0.23, p= 0.000) , food responsiveness (b=0.23, p=0.000), emotional overeating(b=0.09, p= 0.001) and desire to drink(b=0.24, p=0.000) while parents practice of pressure to eat had a negative association with enjoyment of food (b= -0.11, p=&lt;0.001), food responsiveness (b= -0.08, p= &lt;0.001) and emotional overeating (b=-0.11, p=&lt;.001) .Meanwhile, of the food avoidant behaviors such as food fussiness(b=0.09,p&lt;0.001), satiety responsiveness(b=0.13,p&lt;0.001) and slowness in eating (b=0.10,p=0.005) had a positive association x with parents practice of pressure to eat. After adjusting for factors such as socio demographic characteristics, parent's perception and concern about child weight, parental depression status and child psychological status. Conclusion: Parents that practiced food restriction had children that were more food responsive, tend to emotionally overeat, tend to enjoy food more and had more desire to drink. While Parents that practice pressure to eat had children that were more food fussier, satiety responsive and tend to eat slower. The above findings might help parents to understand eating behaviors in young children and to practice appropriate feeding practice to overcome eating problems. Health care providers should provide better support for parents in managing eating behaviors in young children and it is better incorporate appropriate eating behavior and feeding practice as an important component of child feeding strategies.