Maternal Depression in a Racially and Socioeconomically Diverse Cohort: Influences on Infant Feeding Practices.

Feeding practices during infancy and early childhood have lifelong effects on weight and relationships with food. With the growing prevalence of obesity in adults and children, early feeding practices are being examined more carefully as points in which public health interventions may be successful. Experts recommend that feeding practices be responsive in nature. Maternal depression has been shown to have deleterious effects on parenting practices, contributing to their unresponsiveness. As the responsive frameworks for parenting and feeding are similar, we expected to find similar effects of maternal depression on feeding practices. Maternal depression does, in fact, contribute to unresponsive feeding practices in our models. This study gives us a starting point to further explore the relationships of maternal depression and responsive feeding practices, in order to find interventions aimed at increasing the responsiveness of feeding practices in early childhood