Feeding Practices and Child Weight Management

Parental feeding practices play a central role in shaping children’s eating behaviours and, by extension, their weight trajectories. Practices vary from responsive strategies, which encourage children to regulate intake according to hunger and satiety cues, to non-responsive approaches such as pressuring a child to eat or restricting access to particular foods. Instrumental feeding, in which food is used as a reward, and emotional feeding, where food is offered as solace, exemplify coercive control that can disrupt a child’s innate appetite regulation. Evidence increasingly points to bidirectional influences: children’s appetitive traits, such as fussiness or emotional overeating, can elicit more pressuring or restrictive responses from caregivers, while caregivers’ strategies can in turn reinforce or diminish these traits. Interventions aimed at weight management have sought to train caregivers in adopting responsive feeding, tailoring support to the child’s individual eating style. The global rise in childhood overweight and obesity underlines the importance of context-appropriate guidance. Practical applications include structured mealtime routines, positive modelling of balanced food choices and avoidance of overt control techniques. By aligning feeding practices with developmental and behavioural science, practitioners can support healthier eating habits, better weight outcomes and the establishment of lifelong dietary patterns.

Research from Nature Portfolio

No recent Nature Portfolio content available.

Feeding Practices and Child Weight Management publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in feeding practices and child weight management across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Responsive feeding: Practices that allow a child to self-regulate intake by responding appropriately to hunger and fullness cues.

Restrictive feeding: Limiting access to certain foods, often to control weight or consumption of specific nutrients.

Instrumental feeding: Use of food as a reward for desired behaviour, potentially undermining internal appetite regulation.

Pressure to eat: Encouraging or insisting that a child consumes more food than they may desire, often to achieve perceived health goals.

Emotional feeding: Offering food to soothe or comfort a child in response to emotional distress rather than hunger.

Polygenic risk score: A quantitative measure of genetic susceptibility to obesity, derived from multiple gene variants identified in genome-wide studies.

References

1. The effectiveness of interventions on changing caregivers' feeding practices with preschool children: A systematic review and meta‐analysis. Obesity Reviews (2024).
2. Reciprocal associations between parental feeding practices and child eating behaviours from toddlerhood to early childhood: bivariate latent change analysis in the Gemini cohort. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (2023).
3. Parent-reported child appetite moderates relationships between child genetic obesity risk and parental feeding practices. Frontiers in Nutrition (2023).