Nurturing Needs

High levels of food motivation among young children are heritable, tracked over time, and associated with elevated risks of unhealthy eating and obesity. Despite significant growth of family-based obesity prevention efforts, the evidence base is remarkably scant on parenting highly food-motivated children to prevent obesity and poor dietary outcomes. The need to move away from a “one-size-fits-all” approach to food parenting is particularly pronounced for children from racial and ethnic minority families with low income that experience greater disparities in obesity, are underrepresented in the food parenting and family-based prevention literature and for whom prevention efforts have had limited success to date. Our goal is to generate robust basic science evidence for parenting highly food-motivated children to prevent excessive dietary intake and body mass index (BMI) gains during the preschool years among racial/ethnic minority families with low incomes. Using a prospective cohort design, we propose to follow 450 Hispanic and Black caregiver/child dyads with low incomes at three-time points as children transition from preschool to elementary school, when significant numbers of children begin to experience problems of poor diet quality and obesity. We will recruit children with varying food motivation to understand whether highly food motivated children have different needs than other children. We propose a multi-method approach using state-of-the-art measures, including ecological momentary assessment, to comprehensively investigate the amount, types, and consistency of food parenting practices (i.e., specific, goal-oriented behaviors) needed to prevent food motivated behaviors, excessive dietary intake, and BMI gains in children.