adiposity and maternal feeding practices a longitudinal analysis

Background: Parental control has been hypothesized to cause weight gain in children by weakening self-regulatory processes. However, most studies that link control with weight have been cross-sectional, and therefore causation is uncertain. It remains pos-sible that parental control is a response to child overweight rather than a cause. Objective:We investigated the direction of the association between parental feeding practices and children’s adiposity in a longitudinal study. Design: Three subscales of the Child Feeding Questionnaire (CFQ) that measure “pressure, ” “restriction, ” and “monitoring ” were com-pleted by 213 mothers of 7–9-y-old children as part of the Physical Exercise and Appetite in CHildren Study (PEACHES) and repeated by 113 mothers 3 y later. Baseline and follow-up anthropometric measurements [body mass index (BMI); fat mass index (FMI), and waist circumference (WC)] were made by researchers when the children were aged 7–9 y and 10–11 y. Results: Regression analyses showed no association between any of the CFQ scales at baseline and change in child adiposity. In contrast, higher child BMI at baseline predicted a smaller decrease in follow-up CFQ “monitoring ” (P = 0.003) and a larger decrease in “pressure to eat ” (P = 0.04) after baseline scores were controlled for. Similar results were observed for FMI and WC, although they did not reach significance for WC. There were no significant longitudinal associa-tions between child adiposity and the CFQ “restriction ” subscale. Conclusion: The results were more consistent with a “child-responsive” model whereby a mother’s choice of feeding practice is influenced by her child’s weight status rather than her feeding practices influ-encing the child’s weight gain. Am J Clin Nutr doi: 10.3945/ajcn. 2010.30112