Dinner observations of parent sensitivity and pressuring feeding practices with preschool-age children

Family mealtimes play an important role in children’s social and emotional learning. Parents who use controlling feeding practices, such as feeding pressure, are more likely to have children who struggle to self-regulate their food intake. Little research has examined the connections between global parenting sensitivity and the use of feeding pressure. The current study aimed to investigate whether global parental sensitivity in mothers and fathers was related to the frequency of parental feeding pressure and examined day-to-day variability in the associations of these constructs. We recorded videos of a week of mealtime interactions in 100 families with a 3- to 5-year-old child and coded observed parental sensitivity and feeding pressure used at each meal. We used multilevel modeling to test for (a) variability in mothers’ and fathers’ mealtime sensitivity at the within-person level and (b) the relationship between mothers’ and fathers’ sensitivity and pressuring feeding practices each day. We found that mother and father sensitivity varied day-to-day. This variability was related to daily fluctuations in feeding pressure. This result was also seen between families, such that families with more sensitive mothers and fathers showed less feeding pressure with their children than in families with less sensitive parents. These results have implications for the importance of parental sensitivity for children’s mealtime experience.