Snacking in young children: parental definitions, goals, and feeding practices

描述(申请人提供)：小吃可能会导致幼儿摄入过多的能量。家庭是理解儿童如何养成零食习惯的基本背景。然而，还没有研究考察父母教养对低收入少数民族家庭儿童零食行为的影响，这些家庭特别容易患上糖尿病 食物不安全、饮食质量差和肥胖。由于缺乏一个公认的、基于经验的零食定义，对零食的研究一直受到阻碍。这项研究聚焦于有学龄前儿童的低收入非裔美国人和西班牙裔家庭，将：定性地描述父母对儿童零食的定义及其喂养儿童零食的方法(目标1)~严格制定和测试这些结构的量化测量(目标2)~并评估专门针对儿童零食的父母与(A)父母一般儿童喂养做法和方式(B)儿童营养和与体重相关的结果(目标3)之间的关系。这项研究将通过从父母的角度对零食进行现实世界的经验表征，以及开发第一个有效的父母特定零食喂养做法的衡量标准，来促进关于育儿和儿童零食的基础科学和翻译科学的发展。我们的跨学科研究团队包括儿童营养和儿童喂养、育儿理论和食物模式以及定性和定量方法方面的专家。拟议研究的创新之处包括首次对父母对儿童零食的定义及其相关喂养方式进行了实证描述，整合了关于食物模式和儿童喂养的研究，并侧重于营养不良和肥胖风险极大的低收入少数民族儿童的零食问题。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Snacking is suspected to contribute to excessive energy intake among young children. The family is a fundamental context for understanding how children's snacking habits develop. Yet, no studies have examined parenting effects on children's snacking behaviors for low-income ethnic minority families who are at particular risk of food insecurity, poor diet quality, and obesity. Research on snacking has been hindered by the lack of an accepted, empirically-based definition of snacking. Focusing on low-income African American and Hispanic families with preschool-aged children, this study will: qualitatively describe parents' definitions of child snacking and their approaches to feeding children snacks (Aim 1)~ rigorously develop and test a quantitative measure of these constructs (Aim 2)~ and evaluate relationships between parenting specific to child snacking and (a) parents' general child feeding practices and styles (b) children's nutrition and weight- related outcomes (Aim 3). This study will advance basic and translational science on parenting and child snacking through real-world empirical characterization of snacking from parents' perspective and development of the first validated measure of parents' snacking-specific feeding practices. Our interdisciplinary research team includes experts in children's nutrition and child feeding, theories of parenting and food schemas, and qualitative and quantitative methods. Innovations of the proposed research include the first empirical description of parents' definitions of child snacking and thei associated feeding approaches, the integration of research on food schemas and child-feeding, and the focus on snacking in low-income ethnic-minority children who are at disproportionate risk of poor nutrition and obesity.